TIFTON — The Tift County school system is in the initial stages of putting together a new five year strategic plan and they are calling on input from residents to do it.

The school system held a strategic planning meeting for parents, teachers, students and community members to share what they think about the school system and where they think it should be headed.

The meeting was held on Feb. 10 at Northeast Middle School.

Each school system creates a five year plan to act as a guide for how the system can improve. The last five year plan has expired and it’s time to create a new one, according to School Superintendent Adam Hathaway.

Hathaway said it was a typical process that most school systems go through so they can figure out what they are doing well and target those things they need to work on.

“We’re just starting our strategic planning process and having community input is so vital to the success of our school system,” Hathaway said. “We really wanted to reach out to our community, have a large event like this so that we can get their feedback so that we really have their direction moving into the rest of our planning with our strategic plan.”

Approximately 150 individuals attended the meeting to give their input.

Attendees were broken into smaller groups, each of which had frank conversations about the school system’s strengths and weaknesses as well as things that were outside of the system’s direct control but still have an impact on students and the schools.

Each item — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats — were listed on a poster, which was hung beside posters from the other groups detailing the same category. Attendees were then able to go through and mark the items from all the submissions in that category that were the most important.

“We’re going to be taking all of that information and putting it into actual usable data so that, as we’re building the different components of our strategic plan, we’ll be able to include those ideas and thoughts,” Hathaway said. “This is really a meeting to capture the community’s thoughts on our school system and it’s the first meeting of many that will occur over the next couple of months.”

For those not able to attend the meeting, the school system has created an online survey to get the same feedback. The survey, which is offered in both English and Spanish, will be available until Feb. 24.

The survey is located at https://www.tiftschools.com/apps/news/article/1164163.