The Park Ridge-Niles District 64 gave the public the first peek at the new 2020 Vision Strategic Plan.
On April 15, the district held two public meetings at Emerson Middle School. Parents, teachers and Niles and Park Ridge residents were invited to attend.
During the meetings, JJ and Associates consultant Robert Ewy shared the goals and priorities of the new strategic plan. The meeting was designed to give interested parties an opportunity to give feedback and offer their own take on what the plan should be like. That information will be used to continue developing the plan, which will be finalized in May and brought before the district Board of Education in June.
Work on the new strategic plan started at the beginning of the year. As with the previous strategic plans, the 2020 Vision Strategic Plan will be used to set district priorities and goals for the next five years, with particular focus on educational and financial goals.
In January, the district started putting together a volunteer committee to create the plan. It also contracted JJ and Associates, a New Orleans based educational consulting firm, to advise the committee.
To gather public input, the committee sent out a community survey. It also reached out to area community groups and civic organizations, as well as Maine Township High School District 207 Superintendent Ken Wallace. Using that information, as well as information from the study conducted by the Consortium for Educational Change in February, the committee came up with foundation for the new strategic plan.
Since the committee formed, District 64 Superintendent Laurie Heinz gave the Board of Education regular updates on its progress.
The draft was presented to the public during two meetings, which were held on April 15 at 4:30 – 5:30 p.m. and 6 – 7 p.m. The Pioneer Press attended the 4:30 p.m. session.
During that session, Ewy laid out the plan’s goals. That included providing a rigorous education curriculum, maintaining the wide variety of elective classes in the face of a shrinking budget, and renovating aging facilities.
Resident and former board member Herb Zuegel said that he had two issues with the draft.
“I don’t agree with [the facilities goal],” he said. “Students will learn with good teachers. And absent from your list is community involvement. If parents don’t want kids to learn, they are not going to learn.”
Heinz said outreach is already a major priority for the district.
“We are doing outreach all the time,” she said. “We are talking to parents and community members.”
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Ewy added that language emphasizing the importance of community involvement would be included in the plan as it develops.
Board member-elect Tom Sotos said that he felt that the plan was missing one important thing.
“A lot of people in the community would like the schools to raise their rankings,” he said. “It’s probably one of the most important things. The reason why this important is that rating is done by testing, and our students will be testing in some form their whole lives. Rates will keep people coming to Park Ridge.”
Ewy responded that the plan will call for the “scoreboard” that will measure the district’s progress on achieving the goals set out in the plan. Sotos said that it wasn’t good enough.
“On May 15, I’ll be sworn in,” he said. “I want to be able to say that the strategic plan is taking [rankings] into account. There are people in the community that are going to need to have it spelled out.”
Ewy said that, according to the survey, improving rankings wasn’t a major concern. Sotos replied that he was skeptical, insisting that substantial portion of the residents told him they were concerned about rankings.
Residents in attendance were also given an opportunity to give their own comments on what they felt were the district’s strengths and weaknesses. For strengths, they cited good programs, good facilities and the fact that about half of the teachers live in the communities the schools serve.
“When teachers have an investment in our community, there’s good stuff going on,” said Zuegel.
For weaknesses, the members of the public who spoke agreed that the fact that the district wasn’t able to follow through on some of the initiatives outlined in the previous plan was a problem.
Finally, Ewy asked the residents to talk about opportunities the district could capitalize on and the threats that could derail the plan. For opportunities, they suggested reaching out to the district’s growing immigrant population and getting them more involved in schools.
Zuegel highlighted concerns over political squabbling among board members.
“When the adults are squabbling over political views and financial views, when their needs become more important than the children’s needs – I think that’s the real threat,” he said.
After the meeting concluded, Heinz told Pioneer Press that the feedback would be taking back to the planning committee, which will incorporate it into the plan.
As Heinz previously reported to the board, the committee is expected to have the final version of the plan ready by May.
It is expected to be presented to the board sometime in June.
Igor Studenkov is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.