U-46 sets five-year goals

Setting yearly goals is nothing new in Elgin Area School District U-46.

Every year the administration presents a district improvement plan and works toward the goals outlined in the document.

But Jose Torres, superintendent of the state's second largest district, wants Elgin schools to take a longer view.

This week, Torres presented a draft of a five-year accountability plan that will enable the public to judge the district on a variety of metrics that measure student achievement and financial viability.

"It's trying to plant the flag in 2015 and say, 'This is where we want to be,' " Torres said Monday as he presented the draft to the school board. "We're trying to define, what does it really mean to be a great school district?"

The draft document contains specific, ambitious goals for student achievement. For example, the plan shows that only half of first-graders were reading at grade level in the 2007-08 school year (used as a baseline because that's the last year before Torres started).

By the 2014-15 school year, the district aims to get 100 percent of first-graders reading at grade level.

As outlined in the plan, the district also hopes to almost double enrollment in high school Advanced Placement classes, from 1,782 currently to 3,375 in five years; and to narrow the "achievement gap" between low-income students and their peers from about four points on the ACT test in 2007-08 to two points in 2014-15.

Torres acknowledged the goals are ambitious but said they would help focus the district's continuous improvement process.

"We do need to change the system to get where we want to go," Torres said. "A five-year target will galvanize enough energy and resources to get us close to there."

School Board President Ken Kaczynski, though, warned that the plan could make some U-46 employees and parents - who are already dealing with the fallout from substantial budget cuts - nervous about the prospect of more changes.

"We don't want to add stress to an already stressed organization," Kaczynski said.

Torres clarified: "We're not saying it's a wholesale change. It's going deeper in areas we have identified (for improvement)."

District officials plan to schedule a series of meetings over the next six weeks to incorporate public feedback before returning to the school board for final approval in November or December.