As Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 prepares to take its first steps toward creating a new strategic plan, the Board of Education met to review how the previous plan worked out.
During the March 25 meeting, District Superintendent Laurie Heinz presented a review of the previous plan’s results. Her report indicated that, while the district had many successes with introducing and expanding the use of technology in education, it struggled with improving ways to set goals for students and improve collaboration within the district.
The report also gave suggestions for what the district could do better when designing a new strategic plan. That included more emphasis on achieving results, provisions for addressing the district’s financial issues, more planning for facility improvements and regular reviews of the plan’s progress. It also called for the district’s administrative team to take more direct role in the planning process. It would ensure that the district would have the time and resources to implement the plan.
In 2009, the district started working on its current strategic plan. Known as the “Journey to Excellence,” it called for five improvement strategies addressing different facets of the district’s operations. This included incorporating more technology, setting up the system of goals and benchmarks to improve student performance, improving communications between the school staff, families and community organizations, improve instruction and developing a protocol to ensure the staff would be able to actually implement the strategies. Each strategy is further divided into “action plans” that specifically explain how the district would implement each strategy.
The Board of Education approved the plan in 2010. The plan was designed to last for a total of five school years. It started during the 2010-2011 school year, and it is scheduled to end in 2015-2016 school year.
The district staff is currently in the early stages of the planning process for the next strategic plan. Heinz told the board that, with only one year to go on the current plan, this was a good time to look at whether the action plans worked and what the district could learn from its failures and successes.
“Although it’s a different plan we’re going to have moving forward, [the current plan] was a tremendous plan,” said Heinz. “It really allowed the district to move forward in a lot of ways.”
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She told the board that the district made considerable strides with the first strategy, citing 1:1 Chromebook initiative and using Infosnap for student registration as examples. The teachers have also done a better job of using apps to teach students.
“[In the past] everybody was just buying apps year after year, and we didn’t know who buys what,” she said.
Heinz said that success was more mixed with developing a system that would set academic and social goals for each student and track how well the students achieve them. Today, she explained, there is an informal system, but it isn’t being consistently applied. That is because implementing Common Core standards took precedence.
“[The system] hasn’t been implemented with support, and it certainly hasn’t been fully implemented,” said Heinz. “We’re going to continue to focus on goal-setting.”
The key here, she said, was to create goals that fit each student rather then try to come up with something that would apply for everyone.
“Students come in all shapes and sizes,” said Heinz.
Board member Vicki Lee said that her daughter, who goes to school in the district, has benefited from the system. She believes that the system would be a great asset if it’s fully implemented.
Heinz said that the district’s efforts to improve communications with parents and local organizations is very much a work in progress.
“You reach out and you hope its reciprocated,” she said. “Sometimes, it is, sometimes it isn’t. But we need to keep trying.”
Heinz said that the district will continue to work to develop collaborative education programs with local community organizations and groups.
The district plans to place particular focus on reaching out to families from the area’s immigrant communities.
“We have a growing population of families that don’t speak English at home,” she said. “We are going to be doing an [English Language Learners] curriculum review. As we work towards that, we are going to reach about and get ELL families more involved.”
Lee said that she felt that the teachers could do a better job keeping parents in the loop.
“I think it shouldn’t be that difficult, with all of our technology, to send updates on what’s going in class,” she said.
The district staff made more progress on defining expectations for students, using assessments and tailoring lesson plans to fit different students’ learning styles. Heinz said that the district is going to continue working on expanding peer coaching. Accommodating different learning styles has been a mixed bag – while there has been improvement in some subjects, there is still room for improvements in others, such as math. Heinz also explained that the effort to develop better ways to track students’ progress relative to district goals was put on the back burner because implementing Common Core standards took precedence.
Finally, Heinz presented recommendations on what the district could do differently with the new plan. Financial planning, she said, was especially important. She said that, while the district has previously made a commitment not to call for a tax cap increase referendum until 2017, it should try to do more than just stay true to this commitment.
“As 2017 rapidly approaches, we are looking for ways to push the referendum off,” said Heinz.
She said of the weaknesses of the previous plan was that it couldn’t be adjusted if circumstances change. The strategic plan committee would convene every 90 days to check the plan’s progress and make regular annual reports to the board.
Overall, Heinz said that she was optimistic about the next strategic plan
“I’m excited as all get for this work,” she said. ‘I think we have all the data to help develop this plan.”
Board President Tony Borrelli was equally upbeat.
“It’s exciting,” he said. “[listening to the report], I became excited knowing that there is a lot of things that can be accomplished.”
Igor Studenkov is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
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