By Mary Alice Murphy

Silver Schools Associate Superintendent Curtis Clough led off the final Community Dialogue session for this school year.

He thanked Scott Terry and the Silver City-Grant County Chamber of Commerce that manages the Grant County Veterans Memorial Business and Conference Center for hosting the several sessions held this year.

"Today is our action planning meeting," Clough said. "We have partners from outside the region who are willing to help us."

He noted what is happening in the town of Silver City, which invested in Better City. "A workforce and economic development committee is going to form and meet the first time the week of April 22. We can't do what we need to do without significant dollars. We will incorporate what the district has done and partner with Silver City. Adam Hughes of Better City will chair the committee. Maker spaces are a big priority in Silver City and at the schools. The group also wants to work with Western New Mexico University to build youth entrepreneurship. We will start next week."

Clough said the Silver School SB9 levy is up for renewal this year. "It needs to be renewed to bring in the technology that we need. SB9 funding will support the public and private partnerships that are working. I also met with Workforce Solutions. We talked about moving them into our middle school to consolidate them from three separate places."

"Today, we will break up in small groups and create actionable plans," Clough said. "We are developing the action steps to keep us moving forward. You need to do the brainstorming first. We need a separate plan for communications. Come up with strategies on who we need to communicate with."

Each group had its own questions to brainstorm and then write suggestions for the actionable plan. "I ask you to generate one key objective. When you finish that you can go on to 2, 3 and 4, but please get one done first. Create a sequence of actions that are systematic and deliberate to fulfill your objectives. These," he said about the forms he handed out to fill out, "are the theoretical frameworks. Align your actions to your key objectives. They will overlap. Some can merge. For instance, employee engagement will be in with communications. Please complete all sections of the template. I will take continuing feedback. Identify the key milestone and the reporting element for each quarter over the two-year cycle that we anticipate, but it may be shorter. The data doesn't have to be all numbers. It can be qualitative and observations."

For 90 minutes, the groups hashed out what to put into the templates and filled them out.

For the closing activities, Clough said career readiness is the initiative for the cross-sector coordinating strategy. "We will get subgroups together to keep it going. We will try to coordinate all groups in a planned way."