Craven County Schools geared up for beginning of year with new strategic plan

NEW BERN, N.C. (WNCT) — Back-to-School week continues as WNCT is giving you an inside look at how counties across Eastern N.C. are approaching the new school year.

Empty school buildings across Eastern North Carolina are about to be filled with students once again as a new school year begins. In Craven County, a new strategic plan was unveiled that will provide the foundation for the district’s next five years.

“I think I’m most excited about the new strategic plan. It’s a five-year plan. We really are focusing on the community as our partners, and we call it the Craven commitment on student success supporting our teachers, because teacher recruitment and retention is really difficult nationwide right now,” Superintendent of Craven County Schools Dr. Wendy Miller said. “So we need to make sure that we focus on the areas that are important to our teachers and students. Success is really important to someone who’s working in the teaching field.”

Craven Early College High School has already welcomed students back. Their main focus is on the students’ mental health.

“This year, we have a couple of initiatives that are really going to raise the bar for us and we have some wellness days where we’re going to really prioritize wellness activities for our students,” Dr. Marlow Artis of Craven Early College High School said. “So on Fridays here at our school, we have abbreviated Fridays, so our students are dismissed at 12. And so that’s another way for us to be able to meet their specific needs with those wellness days we have planned.”

The strategic plan addresses a specific need for each school. “I am really looking forward to what the strategic plan looks like in each of our buildings,” Dr. Miller said. “And the unique thing is it’s not going to look the same at Havelock High School as it is at Craven Early College. And that’s what I think makes public school so wonderful is we mirror the community we serve.”

The 2024-25 school year has already been one with promise.

“A lot of folks ask me when we start planning the last day of school, the next day is our planning. For the following year, we’ve had summer leadership with all our leaders across the district, planning what we’re going to do for the new strategic plan,” Dr. Miller said. “We’ve had guest speakers in, we’ve had staff development across the state. Learning never stops for our teachers. And that’s so important because we’re models for our students that learning is a lifelong endeavor.”

Craven County Schools are looking forward to unveiling the new strategic plan which took more than eight months of planning to gather information.

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