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For Dayspring Christian Academy (DCA), scheduling an annual staff retreat is nothing new. Weston Kurz, Executive Director of the school based in Greeley, Colorado, remembers hosting a retreat for the past 10 years at least. 

But in the last two years, the retreat has taken on a new flavor. As an early adopter of ACSI’s Flourishing School Culture Model (FSCM), Kurz helped restructure the retreat to integrate research from the FSCM. Using each of the model’s five domains (purpose, well-being, expertise and resources, relationships, and teaching and learning), the school’s strategic planning sessions now revolve around robust research and best practices. 

“It was amazing how the categories we already used in planning fit nicely into the five categories of flourishing schools,” Kurz said. 

“Using the five Flourishing School domains helped narrow our focus, providing clarity and structure,” added Loni Corliss, Elementary Principal at DCA. “It was inspiring to see everyone collaborate toward setting clear, actionable goals that will guide us as we continue to grow and flourish as a school community.” 

Kurz and his school did not have to completely overhaul their approach to strategic planning, but now he feels more confident that their bases are covered. 

“If I were to go back seven years ago, I bet we would have been missing a few of the domains,” Kurz said. “For example, we weren’t focusing enough on the well-being of our staff and our students.” 

DCA has also used ACSI’s Flourishing School Culture Instrument (FSCI) for the last four years and completed ACSI’s accreditation process in 2024, so the school has an abundant pool of assessments to use in its strategic planning. 

“We have data and a school improvement plan that also aligns with the flourishing model,” Kurz said. “The main thing is we’re all talking a common language around categories that we all know are important for our school to be successful.”

“By leveraging the structured and meaningful data from the FSCI, our team effectively created focus areas that aligned with the Flourishing framework,” added Tyler Mowery, DCA’s Chief Operating Officer.

DCA’s leadership team and board of directors focused their conversations on key findings from the survey, utilizing the research they have at their fingertips and looking at each category deeper to appraise their school’s situation. 

“Using the FSCI domains as a framework for creating our strategic plan for this year was incredibly helpful,” added Debra Romey, DCA’s Secondary Principal. “It gave us a structure to look at the data from the survey from our parents, staff, and students and look for ways to create solutions for issues or problems we were seeing in our school.” 

To make the most of a staff retreat, Kurz recommends outside help to facilitate the discussions. DCA has hired a consultant who does strategic planning. 

“A consultant is able to keep the head of school on track and participating in the process,” Kurz said. “There have been times when we haven’t hired someone and I’ve facilitated it, but only once I had practiced it and felt comfortable.” 

With a ministry discount, DCA spent less than $1,500 on the consultant for leading a two-day strategic planning retreat. Even with discounts, Kurz knows options are limited for his school and others for retreats. 

“It’s great if you can do overnight retreats for relationship building, but I know sometimes you don’t have a budget for that. We’ve had plenty of times when we didn’t,” Kurz said.  

Kurz aims to schedule each retreat for at least one full day, if not two. The most ineffective retreat he has experienced was using his own school’s facility.  

“You have to get out of your environment,” Kurz said. “We’ve gone as simple as using the local country club, with their nice boardroom and food.” 

Kurz hopes to use his role as a school leader and ACSI Field Director to encourage other school leaders to structure their staff retreat around the flourishing domains. Kurz welcomes school leaders to reach out to him at weston_kurz@acsi.org. 

“It’s very helpful to adopt wholeheartedly the flourishing model. I’ve been doing this for over 10 years, and I was looking for something that was consistent, norm-based in comparison to other Christian schools, and is common sense,” Kurz said. “I’m pretty particular about this sort of thing, and I’ve found the model to be super beneficial to our school.”