Geneva 304 ready for today, planning for tomorrow

The Geneva District 304 Board of Education spent a large amount of caring, time and energy during the spring and summer identifying our school district's strengths and setting goals for the 2007-08 school year.

Many of these strengths grew from our tradition of excellence and took shape in the high performance and success of our students, our facility master plan, our longer-term district financial plan, the high quality of our staff, the strong community support for education in Geneva 304, and the smaller learning community culture in our growing district.

The discussion of setting goals for the school year, which began for students last week, quickly led our staff and school board to focus on the process of continuous improvement to maximize our service to students over time. In a rapidly changing world, it becomes ever more important to focus on continuous improvement in both the short and long terms.

This process led to an emphasis on goals focusing on reading, problem solving and success for all students, linking everything toward improving student learning. This means we are viewing nearly everything we do from the perspective of how it may or may not impact student learning and working to coordinate our improvement efforts through the planning at both the building and district levels.

Benefits of a Unit District

A definite strength of a pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade unit school district is the coordination of a curriculum that progresses through all grades. This is a design that we call 'spiraling' in education, where the skills get more complex each year in order to match student development and high expectations. Connecting our efforts is important in order to do the best job that we can for students as they move through our system.

Being a unit school district also means that we can coordinate our other efforts toward that common goal of helping all students succeed through and after high school graduation. From an educational standpoint, it is exciting and meaningful to be able to plan curriculum, staffing, facilities, finances, and other services for students throughout their public school careers.

Goals

Our goals are available on our Web site at www.geneva304.org and in our recently published District 304 goals booklet. We encourage everyone to review this information to know better our purpose, goals, planning procedures and action plans all in an effort to serve our students and community.

We also encourage everyone to sign up for information through 304 Connects by following the instructions on our Web site. The 304 Connects program provides nearly instant information about our school district, changes in our school schedule, and other information. These are great tools to keep our Geneva 304 Community Unit School District open to the public.

Ongoing communication

In addition to these resources, we are planning a series of public forums and coffees throughout this school year in an effort to share information with and gain input from the public in regard to many issues impacting education in our district. More information on the dates of these events will be forthcoming. We also encourage people to read our district newsletter, which we plan to publish every other month.

We are very excited about the 2007-08 school year and the many wonderful things that the new year will bring for our students and staff. We want to share the many wonderful things that our students and staff will accomplish with the Geneva 304 community!