James Randall, president of the Marquette Area Public Schools Board of Education and secretary of the Marquette-Alger Regional Educational Service Agency Board of Education, and Michelle DenBeste, a speech language pathologist for MARESA, participate in a community forum on Friday in Marquette. Educators and stakeholders discussed issues that face them, with MARESA to use that input to create a new master plan. (Journal photo by Christie Mastric)

MARQUETTE — What will the local education scenario look like in a few years? That was a focus of a recent three-day education forum held by the Marquette-Alger Regional Educational Service Agency in Marquette and Munising.

Educators from school districts and other stakeholders met at Munising High School on Thursday and the Ramada Inn in Marquette on Friday and Saturday to discuss issues, trends and other topics.

MARESA Superintendent Greg Nyen called the event a “community conversation” that involves representatives from all 13 school districts in Marquette and Alger counties.

“We’re walking through progressive conversation trying to establish what the educational priorities for the future will be for our two-county, or regional area,” Nyen said. “And, of course, that information and data will be used to help MARESA create a new strategic plan.”

The last such plan, he noted, expired in 2020.

“Obviously, we have goals from the educational department of Michigan that we’re constantly working toward,” Nyen told The Mining Journal at Friday’s session. “So while we’re in this interim, we continue to do the work of the state and serve our local districts, but we’d like to create a plan that is really representative of the values of our communities.”

That means listening to those communities.

“It would be easy for a group of administrators to sit in an office building and create a strategic plan in isolation, but what we’re trying to do here is really create a plan that reflects the values and priorities of our local school districts.”

According to its website at maresa.org, MARESA is one of 56 regional educational service agencies created by Michigan law in 1962 to help local school districts provide high-quality education for their students while maximizing district resources. MARESA provides a a variety of specialized programs and shared services.

Nyen said the forum produced “great feedback” from the participants, including input on areas of concern.

For example, on Thursday, educators from schools in these categories — Alger County; Gwinn, Wells Township and North Star Academy; Marquette Area Public Schools; and west end schools — provided information regarding timelines in decades from 1980 to the present as well as lists of “prouds” and “sorries,” or accomplishments and challenges, respectively.

“Prouds” ranged from things such as survival to impactful programs to technology, while “sorries” included technology, loss of enrollment and funding, and lack of human resources.

Top issues and trends listed included teaching and staff shortages, political polarization, equitable practices and increased pressure to do “more and more with less and less.”

On Friday, the participants split into small groups to brainstorm on what they believe are top priorities. Their individual results, which involved early childhood support, computer technical education, more targeted professional development and mental health support, then were shared with the entire contingent.

Michelle DenBeste, a speech language pathologist with MARESA, said her group narrowed its priorities to increased funding “creatively” for programs and baseline funding for stability, qualified staffing, a substitute-teaching initiative and teacher preparatory courses at the high school level, among other issues.

“There’s some other areas around the Midwest that do substitute teaching,” DenBeste said. “What they do is they actually have businesses give some of their employees eight hours a month to go and substitute teach. So, you could have a banker come into the high school and substitute teach at a banking class, at an accounting class.”

Thoughts expressed by another group in a breakaway session included selling communities on the importance of schools, which would be a worthwhile return on investment.

An overview provided by Nyen on Tuesday listed qualitative and quantitative data collected on Saturday and identified weighted priorities, which included expanding early childhood education and implementing robust mental health services.

“The MARESA strategic planning conference was an amazing opportunity for a group of incredible and motivated people from across the two counties to come together to help steer the future direction of education services,” said Dave Mastric, director of facilities as well as event and service learning coordinator for Teaching Family Homes of Upper Michigan, in an email. “The concept of pulling resources together to form a single vision of unity was very refreshing. We may think we have different priorities and perspectives but this three-day event showed us that we are more alike than we are different. We are all motivated by the best possible development of our most precious resource: children.”