The student demographic profile of Jenks Public Schools has significantly changed since the Oklahoma district became a Baldrige Award winner in 2005. The pace and variety of population shifts that Jenks has experienced may resemble those in your own school system’s environment. What evidently hasn’t changed at Jenks, according to Lisa Muller, the district’s assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, is the district’s commitment to improvement and excellence.

Muller outlined two key ways in which Jenks’s continued use of the Baldrige Criteria has driven performance improvement during the past nine years.

“We’ve refined our continuous improvement model to include the district’s core competencies, an idea which wasn’t around in the Criteria in 2005,” she says. “We’ve also developed a school-culture framework that reflects the way in which the district seeks to create a positive school culture through the coupling of best practices with strategic thinking and planning. When combined with our key processes, this framework captures the district’s understanding of who we are as an organization.”

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