Months in the making, Elgin School District U46 has a new long-term strategic plan to guide it over the next five years. After a long series of focus sessions and informal hearings under the guidance of a paid consulting service named the District Management Council, the U46 Board of Education voted unanimously on Monday to approve the new plan that replaces the five-year old “Destination 2015.”
But the eight one-sentence “priorities” that make up the heart of the new plan are so vague — “we will implement and support a challenging, standards-based curriculum across all content areas,” “we will value our collective differences, and develop and recruit a high-quality workforce that honors and reflects the diversity of our students” and so forth — that what really may count are the “measurable goals” and “initiatives” that CEO Tony Sanders and other administrators now must develop to turn those priorities into reality.
“This is the what and the where,” Sanders said. “This is where we see the district heading. It’s not the ‘how we’re going to get there.'”
Sanders has already given a hint of some of those practical initiatives. During the board’s April 6 meeting he revealed that administrators are thinking about turning some underused elementary school building into a magnet school, perhaps somewhat similar to the math-science academy that the Elgin Charter School Initiative unsuccessfully tried to get off the ground last year. He said he sees that as being an expression of the strategic plan’s priority that “we will partner with families and the greater community to foster shared ownership and aligned support for our priorities.”
Sanders earlier had said that he also sees the priority of having “a flexible approach in meeting the academic, social and emotional needs of each student” as justifying an end to the “one size fits all” staffing of schools, in which every high school, for example, gets the same number of assistant principals and deans no matter what its particular challenges or size are.
Referring to the numerous “round tables” to which community leaders had been invited and town hall sessions at which anyone was invited to comment, Board Member Amy Kerber said that “I feel this plan is coming from the community.”
“You still have a lot of work to do with the how but the community gave us the what,” Kerber told Sanders.
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“This has been school board work. What’s coming next is staff work,” said School Board Member Jennifer Shroder.
The District Management Council, based in Boston, received $175,000 for its work with the district. Before writing its first draft, its staffers interviewed 100 of the district’s employees, parents and other “stakeholders.”