Strategic Growth Plan for Catholic Schools

Six, eight, or ten months, depending on the version you choose. All three produce the same final plan.

Ten months is the full process — four Planning Area Team workshops and a school-wide Convocation. Eight months is that same complete process accelerated, with committees meeting about twice a month instead of once. Six months — the Abbreviated Strategic Growth Plan — runs three workshops instead of four and does not include a Convocation.

The longer the timeline, the broader the participation and the deeper the buy-in. And the three are priced within a narrow band, so this is a decision about engagement and capacity rather than budget.

A school-wide survey adds one to two months to any version. Implementation then runs across the five years the plan covers, with ISPD helping form and guide the Implementation Teams.

Several hundred. Twenty-five to thirty leaders interviewed in the Assessment, fifteen to twenty on the Steering Committee, eight to twelve people on each of eight to twelve Planning Area Teams, and roughly two hundred at the Convocation — about sixty percent of whom have never been involved with your school before. That reach is the point, not a side effect.

Not ISPD, and not your leadership alone. Priorities emerge from five independent barometers: each Planning Area Team’s ranking, the Convocation teams’ multi-vote, a multi-vote by everyone at the Convocation’s close, each individual’s private top five, and a final Steering Committee multi-vote. When all five converge, the priorities are a finding rather than a decision — and nobody can claim the outcome was arranged in advance.

An evening — usually 6:00 to 9:00 — where roughly two hundred people gather with one instruction: solve the challenges. The word comes from convocare, to call together.

We draw a hundred-mile radius and invite pastors, campus ministers, board members, and business owners from other institutions, advancement directors from nearby schools and universities, and principals and teachers. They see the Challenges beforehand. They do not see the solutions your teams already wrote — because people handed answers rarely offer their own.

Most schools we work with do. The question is whether anyone is using it. A plan written by three or four people in a session or two is quick to produce and almost impossible to implement, because nobody outside that room feels any ownership of it. If your last plan is in a drawer, that is usually a buy-in problem rather than a content problem — and it is the specific thing this process is built to solve.

Not necessarily — and you should not decide that before the plan tells you. Where priorities point toward a capital project, the plan flows naturally into a financial feasibility study, and the case for the campaign is already written by the community that built the plan. That sequence is the strongest foundation a campaign can have.