ISP Strategic Plan Case Study

In 2015, the International School of Panama created a five-year strategic plan with the assistance of strategic business consulting group. The initiative began with 11 broad goals, which were later condensed into three strategies, Academic Excellence, Organizational Health, and Climate and Culture. The focus of this essay is identification of problems associated within the ISP Strategic Plan’s Organizational Health area. The one strategic goal of Organizational Health states, “Develop and implement policies and procedures to retain highly motivated and valued staff by ensuring their intellectual growth and providing the resources to achieve their professional goals.” (International School of Panama, 2015).

By utilizing a systems thinking approach
For the international teaching community, a teacher commits to employment period of two-year years. During the screening and hiring process, all educators are placed into one of two categories, international hire or local hire. The goal associated with the strategic plan is to increase the commitment from two years to 4-5 years.

For the international teacher, the benefits are many. All international hires are reimbursed for expenses associated with the cost of relocation. This includes air travel and moving expenses for the family. Additionally, each educator receives a housing stipend to cover the cost of accommodations. Health, dental, vision insurance is also provided to the individual and for each family member.

For the local hire, salary is well above the pay scale of any public school of Panama. The benefits differ slightly from the international hires, to include only health, dental and vision insurance. Only locally hired educators and staff pay into the country’s social security tax and as well as other taxes similar to those in the United
The hiring process is very expensive and takes a sizeable amount of staff time. Retaining and not hiring is makes basic economic sense. There are a number of problems that serve as barriers to this strategy. The first barrier is competing to meet and or exceed the salary and benefits structure to attract top tier candidates. To gain a better understanding on the competiveness of the school’s pay structure, ISP is conducting a competitive analysis of identified international schools. The larger question that will need to asked once the findings of the analysis are released is ‘can the school afford it?’

The second barrier of problem related to retention is loss of performance bonus structure. This problem will not affect the new teachers arriving to Panama for the 2016-17 school year. For those teachers who have received performance bonus in the past, many have made the decision to not to stay. The bonus structure was replaced with a professional development program. In this program each teacher can choose a professional development class, workshop or program. This is performed through an application process. Only a number of professional developments are allocated each school