The Strategic Plan
What a first year commits to, what deliberately waits for later years, the content roadmap, the app, and how progress is measured.
Companion document to The Case for The Savio Standard
© 2026 Savio Standard. Provided for informational and planning purposes only, “as is,” without warranty; nothing here is legal, medical, psychological, or other professional advice, and anyone applying these ideas does so voluntarily and at their own risk. The children’s program name is a working title, still to be chosen. Third-party marks belong to their respective owners and imply no affiliation or endorsement. See LICENSE.md and Stewardship & Operations.
This document assumes the argument made in The Case for The Savio Standard — the problem being named, the theory of change, the vision and principles, and the six pillars. What follows is the when and how: what a first year commits to, what deliberately waits for later years, the content roadmap, the app, and the way progress is measured.
The headline: year one is the Pledge and the leadership structure. The six pillars are the destination, not the first-year workload.
1. Year One: What a First Year Actually Commits To
1.1 The two deliverables
A community’s first year has exactly two deliverables: the Pledge in circulation, and a leadership team that exists. Nothing else is required, and treating anything else as required is the fastest way to burn out the four families who volunteered.
This is a deliberate narrowing of an earlier plan that launched all six pillars in a single year. That plan was infeasible for volunteers with jobs and children, and — worse — describing it that way made the ask sound enormous when the actual ask is one page and a signature. Section 1.4 lists what moved out of year one and where it went.
1.2 Phases
| Phase | Timing | Milestones |
|---|---|---|
| 0. Found | Jul–Aug | Recruit 3–5 founding families; name a Director and an Assistant Director; finalize the Pledge text and decide how the Convictions documents are used; simple web presence and email list; brief the pastor as a courtesy (informing, not asking) |
| 1. Launch | Sep–Oct | One kickoff parent night; Pledge signing opens; Homeroom Hosts recruited room by room as class lists land; first homeroom gatherings |
| 2. Hold | Nov–Mar | Hosts keep the pledge in front of their rooms; signing stays open — new families arrive all year, and grades activate as they fill; one or two formation touchpoints only if there is appetite and a presenter |
| 3. Renew | Apr–Jun | Parent climate survey; a short year-one report to pledge families; commission next year’s Director, Assistant, and Hosts; decide which single pillar, if any, year two adds |
1.3 The minimum viable leadership team
Four or five families, a few hours a month each:
- Director — holds the whole; makes sure the Pledge launches and the guardrails hold.
- Assistant Director — recruits and supports Homeroom Hosts; the continuity plan.
- Homeroom Hosts — one or two families per room; the point of contact for the pledge, and eyes on the family at the edges. Gatherings are welcome, not required — Hosts lead in whatever way fits them.
The Communications and Events Coordinator roles are real roles, but in a first year the Director and Assistant can hold them between them — a calendar published early and each event announced twice is the entire communications job at this stage. The Facilitator bench is not a year-one role. Full pitches, duties, hours, and terms for every role are in Roles & Responsibilities.
1.4 What explicitly waits
| Deferred | Moves to | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The eight-session formation series | Years two and three, beginning with two or three sessions | Eight evening sessions is a program; a community needs to exist before it can attend one |
| Facilitator training day and bench | Year two | The protocol is published and usable by any family from day one; trained facilitators are the escalation path, and escalations are rare in a first year |
| The children’s program (Upstander Kids) | Year three and on | The most staffing-hungry pillar; it needs an established adult community underneath it |
| Community digital-oversight guide and tool shortlist | Year two or three | The household norms are already Pledge commitment six; the community layer can follow |
| Dads’ and moms’ groups, all-school socials | Whenever someone wants to run one | Good, and entirely optional |
| The app beyond signing and content | After the pilot | See Section 3 |
1.5 The formation series, when it comes
The full curriculum is eight sessions, monthly, ninety minutes. A community adding formation in year two should run sessions 1 and 5 first — the state of childhood, and the hard conversation — and add the rest only as attendance justifies it.
- The State of Childhood. The Anxious Generation findings, the local reality, and why parents — not the school — are the ones who can fix it. Ends with the Pledge.
- Conflict vs. Bullying, and the Words for Both. The glossary session. When to coach your child through conflict and when to intervene.
- Relational Aggression. The hidden curriculum of grades 3–8: exclusion, rumor, alliance, the group chat. Separate breakout discussions for parents of girls and boys.
- Raising an Upstander. The bystander research, and the scripts and dinner-table habits that produce children who intervene.
- The Hard Conversation. The parent-to-parent protocol, taught with live role-play. The session everyone will remember.
- The Digital Front. Phones, group chats, and pornography exposure — a frank, well-prepared segment on what children are actually seeing and saying online, then the oversight norms: message review, no bedroom devices, age-appropriate guardrails, and where to find recommended tools that enforce them.
- When It’s Your Kid. Discovering your child is the aggressor: shame, denial, repair, and consequence at home. The least attended and most important session; consider pairing with confession availability.
- Building the Village. Inclusion as a discipline, the mentor program, next-year commitments, and commissioning of the coming year’s leadership team and Homeroom Hosts.
1.6 A note on the pilot school
The founding team doubles as the pilot school’s leadership team — with one distinction kept deliberately clear even while the same people hold both kinds of role: the roles above belong to the community (the local, independent group of parents), while the steward and maintainers belong to the project. Every volunteer position has a written description stating its duties, its term, and its first duty of inclusion. All roles are designed to be done at a few hours a week or less; the plan deliberately avoids any role that requires a heroic individual, because heroic-individual ministries die in year three.
2. Content Plan
Content is the asset that scales; events are the asset that bonds. Everything produced for the pilot is written once and packaged for reuse by future schools. Draft status for each item below is tracked in TODO.md — the project’s living checklist — rather than restated here, so this section doesn’t need an edit every time a document moves from drafted to final.
2.1 Core library
- The Pledge — one page, plus a two-page rationale with the theological and research grounding.
- The Convictions — parent version and community version, one page each; the founding team decides how and when each is introduced at the pilot.
- The Glossary — parent version and child versions (K–2, 3–5, 6–8).
- The Protocol Guide — a printable one-pager plus a longer guide with worked examples and scripts.
- Formation series kit — for each of the eight sessions: presenter deck, discussion guide, take-home sheet, and a recorded version for parents who miss it.
- Children’s program meeting kits — monthly meeting plans by age tier: skit scripts, stories, games, discussion questions, and take-home cards a trained parent volunteer can run.
- Facilitator manual — training curriculum, ground rules, scope and escalation boundaries, case-refusal criteria.
- The Digital Oversight guide — the household norms, guardrail concepts by age, a family tech agreement template, and a maintained shortlist of recommended tools (any founder-built product on the list is disclosed as such).
- Situation guides — short, findable pieces: “My daughter was left out of a party,” “My son is in a group chat that turned cruel,” “Another parent just called me about my kid,” “The school isn’t acting — now what.” These are the app’s seed content and the SEO front door for the eventual multi-school phase.
2.2 Ongoing channels
Communication is deliberately light: the year’s calendar published early, each event announced and reminded, the occasional short survey (including the annual parent climate survey), and optionally a recorded version of the formation talks for parents who miss a session. There is no newsletter and no content channel — the content library carries the teaching, and sustained editorial channels are how volunteer efforts burn out. Resist the temptation to build more communication than the founding team can sustain.
3. The App
The app is a delivery and coordination layer, not the product — the pledge community is the product. It should not gate the pilot; paper and a simple website can run year one. One rule governs everything: content out, never chatter in. There is no messaging anywhere in the platform — the Project will not build for adults the medium it trains children to resist (see the Case, Section 4: Guardrails). Given in-house development expertise, the sensible sequence:
Phase 1 — Content and pledge (build during pilot year)
- Pledge signing with the grade-level activation mechanic (private until threshold, then mutual introduction — the single highest-value feature to automate).
- Content library with age-of-child personalization, and event announcements/notifications.
- The Digital Oversight guide and recommended-tools shortlist, delivered as content — the enforcement tooling itself lives in separate dedicated products, not in this app.
- Grade and homeroom rosters (opt-in), event RSVPs, and formation-session recordings.
- The children’s program companion app (already begun as a separate LMS-style app): curriculum tracks, milestone badges, meeting companion content. Decide during the pilot whether it remains a second app or merges into one family platform; either way, child accounts are parent-managed, data-minimal, and COPPA-compliant by design.
Phase 2 — Coordination (year two)
- Facilitation requests: a quiet, structured way to request a facilitated conversation without a dozen awkward texts.
- Formation-series progress for parents; discussion guides in-app for Leads, Hosts, and small-group leaders.
- Multi-school support: any parent can open their school, content is white-labeled, activation mechanics are per-school-per-grade.
What the app must never do
No incident reporting, no logging of conflicts, no naming of children in any stored record, no anonymous accusation features, and no discussion forums (which become the gossip network the Project exists to prevent). These exclusions are principled and also prudent: a database of allegations about named minors is a defamation, privacy, and safeguarding liability that would end the ministry. The app carries content, commitments, and coordination — never cases.
4. Stewardship
How the organization operates — entity structure, licensing, terms of use, safety guidance, and sustainability — lives in the companion Stewardship & Operations, so that neither this plan nor the Case has to carry it. The short version: the organization publishes a free framework and stewards its content, name, and app; the local groups that adopt it — Savio Communities — are independent, self-organizing parent groups responsible for their own activities. Savio Standard serves as steward of the Project’s intellectual property, under a published Stewardship Commitment whose first promise is that the mission is free for families, forever. The standing guardrails that shape daily culture — confidentiality, no gossip network, no adjudication by facilitators, no public criticism of the school — are Principles-level commitments and live in the Case, Section 4.
5. Measurement
The Project measures itself annually against the death spiral it exists to reverse. The parent climate survey (anonymous, ten minutes, run at launch and each spring) is the primary instrument.
| Measure | Year-one target |
|---|---|
| Leadership structure | A Director and an Assistant Director named, and a Homeroom Host in at least 60% of rooms. This is the real year-one metric — the structure is what carries every later year |
| Pledge signatures | ≥25% of school families; activation (8+) in at least 3 of 9 grades |
| Room coverage | Every homeroom has heard about the pledge from its Host, and every family in the room has had a fair chance to sign |
| Parent climate survey | Run at launch and in the spring. Improvement on: “I believe other parents here would listen if I raised a concern about their child” and “My child has adults and peers who would stand up for them” |
| Protocol usage | Tracked but not targeted in year one — the protocol works whether or not anyone reports using it |
| Formation attendance | Only if sessions are run. If they are: ≥25 unique parents |
| Retention | Zero pledge families withdrawing from the school citing culture (the ultimate metric, tracked over 3 years) |
Current, per-item drafting status lives in TODO.md, not here — check there before assuming anything below is stale. As of this writing, still to be drafted: the kickoff-night talk and the founding-team charter.