Dist. 87 surprised by state tracking program

Glenbard High School District 87 has been entered into a pilot state program that will track academic improvements of districts in the state that did not meet No Child Left Behind standards. Unfortunately, nobody told school officials.

At a board meeting Monday, Assistant Superintendent for Educational Services Hector Garcia said the Rising Star program began at the start of the school year, but the regional office of education did not notify them until earlier this month.

“All of a sudden we received a memo that said, ‘This is a new process and you're behind already,'” Garcia said.

The delay in notification should not cause too much of a problem, however. The new program requires the district to submit an electronic version of its plan to boost academic performance and provide periodic status updates to the regional office.

In this year's state report card, the district failed to meet Adequate Yearly Progress numbers, a measure of academic growth introduced by the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. As a result, the district had to come up with an improvement plan.

Garcia said the district improvement plan was already in place and that the new program gave officials a chance to go over it.

“It did a good job of helping us review our plan and consolidate our efforts into one crisp district improvement plan,” he said.

Also at the meeting, the policy overseeing harassment and bullying at Glenbard High School District 87 has been expanded and will now include instances of cyber-bullying, or bullying done with the assistance of computers and technology.

The revised policy will prohibit “bullying using a school computer or school computer network.”

“It's always being reinforced,” said Community Relations Coordinator Peg Mannion. “But this says, ‘This is our expectation, we want this sort of behavior.' We are very mindful of what technology is and how it is playing out.”