Learn More About * Our Schools * Our Children * Our Future

2011 represented the 10th anniversary of the Orono Alliance. To mark this important milestone, the Alliance engaged an outside consultant to better understand your awareness and expectations of our organization. Through 52 personal interviews, several focus groups and 450+ parent surveys, we now have a better understanding of how you, our supporters, would like to see the Orono Alliance develop in the coming years.

The research, completed in June 2011, indicated the following information:

• The Orono community has extremely favorable opinions of the Orono School District (See Chart A). Greater than 90% of respondents felt that academics, faculty and administration were excellent or very good.

• The Orono Alliance needs to better describe how contributions are being used to benefit our children. The current annual report demonstrates how your contributions have made a significant difference for the education of our children at Orono.

• We learned that the Orono community is encouraging and might support, with monetary contributions, efforts to enhance the education of our children in several areas (See Chart B). The Orono Alliance will reach out to engage our community in seeing how these efforts may come to fruition.

• The Orono Alliance should work more closely with the Orono School Board and Superintendent to better serve the needs of our children. As a result, the Orono Alliance will work closely with the School District to help in funding programs which were identified by both the District and our community as important for our students. We already began this effort with the Fund-a-Need thrust in the spring of 2011 and successfully raised $100,000 for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) needs of our students.

• The Orono Alliance needs to realign the staffing model to gain efficiency and capacity to respond to the community’s desire for future focused capital campaigns. As a result, The Orono Alliance has re-organized the internal staffing structure to accommodate two part-time employees with unique roles: Jeanne Cook (Director of Development) and Sheila Ross (Marketing and Administrative Coordinator).

If you would like additional information about the Orono Alliance, you can email your request to: Sheila@oronoalliance.org.