NAPT® President Rick Grisham reports that the Board has been working collaboratively over the last few weeks to develop a new strategic plan.
“The school transportation landscape is changing rapidly and significantly,” Grisham said. “We want to not only remain in the forefront of conversation about it, but we also want to lead the change, to BE the change, whenever possible.”
What’s new: Recognizing that, even pre-pandemic, the traditional approach to strategic planning is not well suited for rapidly evolving markets, the Board engaged the professional services of a firm that specializes in strategic planning, member engagement and governance designed to facilitate an online process that evaluated NAPT’s longstanding Vision, Mission and Strategic Priorities.
“We wrestled with a variety of new challenges in 2020 and 2021 and innovated or improvised to overcome them,” Grisham said. “In doing so it became clear that the current pace of change requires a super flexible one to two-year strategy to go along with the traditional three to five-year worldview”
“The things we learned in the last 18 months are going to help us create high-impact opportunities in the future,” Grisham added. “We need to adapt our business model accordingly.”
In addition to confirming that leadership, communication, education, and advocacy remain the core of NAPT’s value proposition, the Board also added diversity, equity and inclusion, data collection and utilization, collaboration, and partnerships as specific components of the organization’s new plan.
Grisham said the new plans will require NAPT leaders to spend even more time working among the broader education community, particularly in Washington, D.C., and state political arenas, to pursue NAPT’s goals and strengthen NAPT’s brand recognition.
“There is clearly a paradigm shift going on in U.S. education,” Grisham said. “We need to not only be aware of the conversation, but we also need to be involved in or leading as many of them as possible so we can influence the outcomes to the advantage of our members.”
Additional information about each of the topics mentioned above will be provided in future editions of School BUSRide and Dispatch, the organization’s official publications, and email updates to members.