As Elgin School District U46 gathers suggestions about its future direction, comments from the public are rolling in — though slowly.
The first draft of a proposed new five-year strategic plan was composed by the Boston consulting firm District Management Council, based on interviews with 100 “stakeholders” and talks with the board of education. Now the district is hosting a series of roundtables and town hall meetings at which anyone can deliver comments or ask questions about what they’d like to be included in the document.
Last Monday, two “roundtables” each attracted about 10 leaders from community organizations, ranging from an African-American pastor to elected officials to a homeless liaison. But when the doors were flung open to just anybody who wanted to speak during two “town hall” sessions at South Elgin Hugh School on Tuesday, only six people showed up who were not part of the school administration, the consulting firm or the volunteer steering committee that helped draft the plan.
More town hall sessions will be held at Larkin High School, 1475 Larkin Ave. in Elgin, on Wednesday, March 18 from 4:30 to 6:15 p.m. and from 6:30 to 8:15 p.m. A roundtable also will take place on March 18 from 9 to 11 a.m. at the Bartlett Public Library, 800 S. Bartlett Road, Bartlett, and besides the invited community leaders, anyone from the public will be allowed to comment at that meeting.
U46 spokeswoman Karen Fox said a copy of the draft plan also will be posted soon on the district’s website, http://www.u-46.org, and a button will be set up there so people can make comments online. Meanwhile, she said, people also can email comments to info@u-46.org
Among many other thrusts, the draft plan includes a call for more flexibility between schools. During the Tuesday sessions, District CEO Tony Sanders explained how he would interpret that.
Sanders said the curriculum to be taught in every school would be set by administrators in the Central Office. But the resources and employee levels that now are assigned to each school strictly by formulas would become more flexible.
“For example, South Elgin High has 2,800 students. Larkin High has 1,700. Yet the administrative structure for a high school is identical — one principal, one assistant principal, one associate principal, deans. It’s too much ‘one size fits all,’ with no consideration for each school’s special needs because of dual language or low income and so on.”
Sanders said that if an elementary school had a lot of emotionally disturbed students, its staff might want to allow bigger fourth-grade classes so it could hire an additional social worker.
Another thrust of the draft plan is to recruit a more ethnically diverse teaching staff, to better match the student body that is 70 percent Hispanic, black or Asian. Hosanna Jones, staff member of the District Management Council, said research shows that in U46 “race is a greater predictor of student performance than income is. That’s not true everywhere. That shows something is happening here.”
One of the draft plan’s priorities would be to recruit a staff “that honors and reflects the diversity of our students.”
Keith Molof, a math teacher from Tefft Middle School who attended one town hall, said he would change the word “honors” to “cares about.”
“Interview 100 people and see if they would rather be honored or rather be cared about,” Molof said.
“I get frustrated when people see the word ‘diverse’ and can’t connect that to ‘highly qualified,'” said Laurel Bault, a part-time AVID tutor who also works at Tefft.
Asked why the plan notes “low morale among U46 staff,” Jones said that idea came from school employees who were among the 100 people interviewed by DMC. “Some employees associate themselves with their school but don’t like to associate themselves with the school district,” she said.
Lisa Hopp of Elgin said one thing that harms morale and discourages recruiting is the risk that a newly hired teacher might be “RIF’ed” (reduced in force, or laid off) a year after being hired. School Board President Donna Smith said that in the past few years, the district has tried hard “not to overhire” and “we’re RIFing a lot fewer people now.”
