Lumen Impact Group
Lumen Impact Group

Elevating School Improvement Planning: From Compliance to Transformation

Published: August 30, 2025

By Gina Schlieman, Partner at Lumen Impact Group

When your school engages in its annual planning cycle, it can be tempting to focus on the requirements. Reviewing metrics, filling out forms, and discussing outcomes around a board or conference room table can feel monotonous and dry when it’s about checking boxes. With this mindset, School Improvement Planning can fall flat and leave the team feeling uninspired as they move on to the busy day-to-day activities of school. But, done well, it can provide clarity and direction for teachers, staff, and parents, empowering and inspiring a school community. 

At Lumen, we believe School Improvement Planning — and strategic planning more broadly — can be so much more than a compliance exercise. When elevated, it becomes a powerful tool for transformation.

The Risk in Just Checking the Box

When schools approach improvement planning as something to “get done,” the process produces plans that are often:

  • Overly broad or unrealistic
  • Detached from daily practice
  • Misaligned with long-term vision
  • Forgotten as soon as the year gets busy

In these cases, the plan doesn’t drive improvement — it simply exists on paper.  Which may check the box, but can become a waste of time and resources that are  already hard to come by in schools.

Taking Planning to the Next Level: Real Growth and Impact

But with the right lens, annual planning can serve as a lever for growth. Instead of just documenting incremental steps, schools can use the process to:

  • Revisit their vision of what excellence looks like for their students
  • Connect immediate goals to longer-term strategic outcomes
  • Ask hard questions about performance and quality: Where are we now, and where do we want to be?
  • Design action steps that aren’t just doable, but result in meaningful, measured change

When schools shift their mindset from “meeting requirements” to “maximizing opportunity,” annual planning becomes an engine for stronger teaching, deeper learning, and better outcomes. 

Making the Data Make Sense

Finding the path to transformational change can be tricky. This is where thought partnership can make a difference. Many schools have the data. Many even desire change. But interpreting trends, identifying root causes, and deciding which proven strategies will truly move the needle — that’s hard work to do alone.

At Lumen, we partner with schools to help them:

  • Make sense of their data in context
  • Distinguish between surface issues and deeper root causes
  • Prioritize actions that will matter most
  • Build a plan that is not only actionable, but transformational

In practice, this often means taking a standard improvement plan and asking: How does this connect to our bigger goals? What does this look like if we aim not just to improve, but to become a scalable model of excellence for others?

Why It Matters

When annual planning is elevated, it becomes more than a cycle. It becomes a chance to redefine what’s possible for the school. Leaders move from asking “How do we meet expectations this year?” to “How do we create the conditions for excellence?”

That’s the difference between compliance and transformation.

And it’s why we encourage schools not to see School Improvement Planning as an obligation, but as an opportunity to reimagine what it might look like to achieve their greatest impact.

Testimonials

"They don’t tell you what you want to hear. They tell you what you need to hear. That makes a huge difference. We needed to understand our weaknesses in order to make the organization work right, and I was overwhelmed by how they really got it and they helped us to get it too. They were able to do it in a way that really made me want to understand the goals we needed to focus on. I believe Lumen was absolutely the best we could have found."
Barbara Sellinger
Cresthaven Academy
"I’ve been in nonprofits for 30+ years and have used the services of many consultants, but I have never been so comfortable with their commitment to helping us. It was as if the Lumen team shared our need to have a successful outcome and they were committed to the notion that they would indeed bring value to what we were doing. "
Caroline Novak
Alabama School Readiness Alliance
"The Lumen team did a really good job sharing the hard truths with us. Their findings were different from what we were expecting, but they used the information to push us farther than we originally planned. They were candid and didn’t hide anything from us. We’re now on the path to developing products that are very different from what we’ve done before but are hopefully much more useful for the people we serve."
Drew Jacobs
National Alliance of Public Charter Schools
"The management of a federal CSP grant is a really niche area that requires a tremendous depth of expertise and technical know-how. You need to have a microscopic attention to detail when it comes to compliance and reporting timeliness. The Lumen team is excellent at all of the above. "
Tyler Barnett
New Schools for Alabama
"In my coaching, we make really strong, specific plans for next steps and then we follow up on them in our next conversation. We try to keep those next steps really manageable. When I’m busy, I can’t layer a ton of personal growth on top of my other responsibilities, so we make plans for growth that are baked into the work I’m already doing. That has been really helpful for me. "
Kristen Forbriger
City Fund
"With everything in the CSP world, Lumen has someone on their team with the experience and focus to guide you through the processes. They partnered with us through what would have been a very difficult process had we tried to stumble through it on our own... we probably could have muddled through it as a team, but with their support it was much more smooth, efficient, and professional."
Shannon Greer
Utah Association of Public Charter Schools
"As I got to know the Lumen team, their questions and willingness to support us made it clear they were a good match. They were very engaged, quick to respond, and aligned with how we think as an organization."
Donterrio Marzetti
KIPP Tulsa Public Charter Schools