The current strategic plan for Decatur Public Schools begins by outlining both its mission and its vision for the school district:
The mission of Decatur Public Schools is to unlock students’ unique and limitless potential to achieve their personal aspirations as fully prepared, contributing citizens in a global society.
DPS will ensure educational learning experiences distinguished by
· commitment to the whole person resulting in student growth
and confidence
· relevant, innovative, personalized academic pathways that promote passion and pride
· a learning environment that fosters curiosity and the thirst for achievement and discovery
· a culture of diversity, adaptability, and resilience
· meaningful and lasting relationships
· extraordinary school and community connections
Wow. This word salad could grace the menu of any three-star Michelin restaurant in the United States!
Recently, I have heard both current school board members, and current board candidates, discuss the need for the next board to create a new strategic plan. I couldn’t believe I heard those statements being made. Any effort to re-do or re-work the strategic plan is absolutely the LAST THING our school district needs to embark upon!
As part of the recent upgrade to the DPS61 website, the strategic plan has its very own set of content pages (seen here). These pages outline the background of the overall process, the district’s belief statements, the 5 stated goal areas (student experience, environment, the whole student, staff & community), and strategies/action plans on both the departmental & building levels. When you drill down further into these areas you will find a veritable cornucopia of plans specific to individual departments, a list of district-wide projects, tools & software packages that need implemented as well as some actual, quantitative benchmarks they would like to achieve.
For example, if one digs deeper into the section titled Department Plans, you ultimately find a set of links depicted in the image below.
Each one of these boxes represents a specific area of concentration within the strategic plan. As you can see, district administration has identified 14 unique categories and when you select a specific category, you will be led to a series of stated goals & action plans that correspond to that specific area of concentration.
If you click on “Teaching & Learning” there are at least some measurable & quantitative goals surrounding grade-level readiness in both reading & math. Okay, not bad. However, when you drill down on say “Technology”, the focus is centered around ensuring that system users change their password credentials and that all of the devices are on the latest operating system version. We just can’t quite grasp the mission-critical connection between making sure the latest critical update from Microsoft is installed and increasing test scores at a rate of 8.9% by the end of the school year.
As one begins to peruse this material in more depth, you realize that this quickly transforms from the word-salad I listed in the introduction into the “mother of all salad bars.”
It’s nice that the various departments have stated goals & objectives, but how important are they to what actually happens in the classroom? Shouldn’t Teaching & Learning be elevated to the highest priority in the district’s strategic plan? At a minimum, the board and central administration should take the approach that Teaching & Learning is “first among equals.”
So, it becomes quite clear to the casual reader that the work has already been done. Just because leadership chose to place a timestamp on the document (STRATEGIC PLAN: 2018 -2025) doesn’t mean this work carries a “best-by” date. It is quite clear that tens of thousands of dollars and probably thousands of hours have been dedicated to this project. The last thing we need is more consultants, more time away from job duties or hollow community-engagement events.
Here’s the question we should ask ourselves: “what would the result be after taking another swipe at the current strategic plan?”
If you cut through all of the platitudes & the high-priced vocabulary, DPS61 is left with the fundamental purpose of providing a quality education to our children that allows them to flourish, providing a safe environment in which to learn, hiring qualified educators, and being responsible stewards of the community’s resources. Something tells me that when the Decatur Public School District was officially established in 1865, it was charged with these same fundamental purposes & objectives. What has changed since then? The answer: “nothing!” These are the same principles that motivated Gloria Davis’s team when they created their strategic plan in the early 2000s, and I can assure you (because I was part of the process) this is what motivated the cadre of administrators, teachers & community members in 2017 when they created the strategic plan that serves as the basis for this current iteration. Again, this begs the question: “what will be different or, for that matter, better this time around?”
You will note that the tagline of this article is “It’s Time to Get to Work!” We’ve always told our readers that our goal is to offer solutions, not to sit back and simply look like bomb throwers. In several of our postings, DPS Chalkboard has been quite clear as to what it believes to be the most critical challenges facing our school district today…, now…, here in March of
2023: low academic achievement, violence in our schools & the need to hire qualified teachers and/or full-time educators.
So, once again, here are our recommendations as to how the district needs to approach these areas:
1. Low Academic Achievement – intense focus on reading & math in grades K through 4; move back to homogenous instruction at the elementary levels, combine MacArthur & Eisenhower into one high school at a single campus, eliminate the K-8 programs at Dennis & American Dreamers & create one middle school that handles 6th, 7th & 8th grades
2. Address the violence in our schools – give a wide berth to Mr. Talley and allow him to create & implement the protocols he deems necessary to create and maintain a safe learning environment; a district-wide ban on cell phones in the classroom
3. Hire more teachers – simply put recruit, recruit, recruit; the critical nature of this point requires that all available district administrators scour the Midwest visiting universities, colleges & job fairs to recruit and hire qualified, full-time educators for District 61
None of these actions require modifying the district’s strategic plan. In fact, each of these points falls squarely into the goal areas outlined in the plan as it reads now – student experience, student environments and staff, respectively.
Furthermore, this work can, and should, begin right away under the direction of Superintendent Clark. By its mere existence, the board of education inherently delegates this authority directly to the superintendent & the district leadership team. A board vote is not needed, nor is board consideration or discussion necessarily warranted.
Finally, the amount of community input required for these initiatives is absolutely ZERO! The community elects the board, and the board hires the professionals necessary to carry out the district’s duties and to meet their objectives. The citizenry can voice their approval or disapproval at the ballot box. And as a parent, you can embrace the opportunity afforded your child by District 61, move into one of the county school districts, avail yourself of the private schools in the area, or simply home school. The choice is yours.
In his recent book How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises, author Spencer Klavan outlines a phenomenon that he calls chronological chauvinism which is:
the conviction that newer must always mean better, and that modern views are automatically more reasonable than ancient ones.
To me, the perceived need that we must redo the strategic plan simply because leadership assigned an arbitrary expiration date to it is a great example of chronological chauvinism.
Consider this. A simple Google search regarding the official recognition of DPS61 resulted in the following:
“The Decatur Public School District was established in 1865 and is in the state of Illinois.”
One could safely assume the main objective for the school district in 1865 was to provide the best education to our children so they could become whatever they wanted to be, while at the same time effectively managing the limited resources the community had to offer.
You can insert all of the flowery language and timely catchphrases your heart’s desire. At the end of the day – or should we say at the end the 158th year – that objective likely has not changed. The time for lofty rhetoric has come and gone. It is time to focus on the classrooms and get to work!
(Epilogue: After doing a deeper dive into the strategic plan’s main document, we did identify one area that could require a “new set of eyes”. Nowhere in that document will you find the word CLASSROOM! Seriously?!? That is where the proverbial rubber meets the road! If there is no success in the classroom, there is no success in the district. We would love to hear someone’s explanation for that little tidbit!)