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Stakeholder involvement in organized shared leadership drive change in District 102. Paramount to continuous improvement are the interpersonal relationships that flourish from our collaboration.  Together, we are creating 21st Century learning environments resulting in more student engagement, contentment, and achievement. Every success in teaching and learning begins with the end in mind, the district vision.

The vision of District 102 can be summarized in the following way: "Every day, every student will come to school and be met with learning opportunities at his/her personal developmental level in all subject areas. He/she will leave school having been challenged, feeling successful, and looking foward to tomorrow."

To this end, annual district goals are designed and everyone works in concert to achieve the goals.

The District implemented new Language Arts and Social Studies resources during the 2006-2008 school years. Staff, utilizing the Illinois Social Studies and Language Arts Learning Standards (K-8) as a guide, developed the curricula. Macmillan/McGraw-Hill Treasures resources were purchased by the District to support the implementation of the Language Arts curriculum at the Kindergarten through fifth grade levels. Major areas of learning include the genres of strategies, responding, narrative, expository, persuasive, research and technical reading and writing. Each area of learning is taught at each grade level with resources designed to address differences in pacing and learning styles. For example, Treasure Chest is aligned with Treasures, but is tailored to the needs of English Language Learners (ELL). The expectation is that students will gain greater sophistication as they progress through the grades. To enhance writing instruction, MyAccess, an online writing laboratory that provides immediate feedback to students aligned with Illinois Learning Standards was introduced as a pilot at the seventh and eighth grade levels. This pilot is expanding in the 2009-2010 school year across the fourth through eighth grades. Through this online access, students are able to draft, revise and edit work with the benefits of immediate feedback and corrective instruction from any location with Internet access.

The cornerstone of instruction is for each student to become more proficient in reading, writing, speaking and listening. Teachers’ Curriculum Resources (TCI Approach) resources were purchased to support the Social Studies curriculum developed by instructional leaders in the District. This approach includes History Alive!, Geography Alive!. and Social Studies Alive! which are implemented across the all grade levels to explore and expand understand about global interdependence and historical origins of our nation. The expectation is that students will gain greater depth of knowledge and sophistication about the subjects as they progress through the grades.

In the 2007-2008 schoo year, the district also implemented Response to Intervention or RTI in reading and now plans to expand into writing, math and social emotional learning in the current school year. Response to Intervention (RtI) is “the practice of providing 1) high-quality instruction/intervention matched to student needs and 2) using learning rate over time and level of performance to 3) make important educational decisions” (Batsche, et al., 2005).

To support this initiative, the Board of Education approved and added an additional five (5) highly qualified teachers as interventionists.  These are the people who provide students extra (tiered) service in addition to their regular math and language arts blocks.

While guided by the State-approved Technology Plan, twenty-four major initiatives were pursued in 2007-2008 including upgrades of servers and client workstations across the District, installation and migration of services to a fiber optic infrastructure between all buildings and the Illinois Century Network, expansion of the wireless network in all buildings providing ubiquitous access for students and teacher laptops, and a complete migration of the Skyward system (our financial and student management system) to a dedicated server room with redundant data storage and power solutions. These operational elements were implemented in 2007-2008 to support the instructional capacity of student, teacher, and community learning environments envisioned by the 21st Century Committee. This committee, comprised of faculty, staff, parent and community stakeholders, meets formally three times per year to establish and monitor growth toward the realization of 21st Century Learning Environments across the entire learning community.

The current phase of the committee’s work on the technology planning process has brought forth the realization of an ongoing professional development strategy providing access to 21st Century Tools for all teachers in the District. As such, a pilot of interactive whiteboard technology was expanded to include nine SMARTboards, one Promethean ActivBoard, and one Interwrite board (in addition to their related peripherals including student response systems, slates, and projectors) in the 2007-2008 school year. Now over 33% of classrooms are configured with Interactive WhiteBoards (IWB) with building plans and Mini Grants expected to increase the usage and desire in this 2009-2010 school year. Finally, teachers began to pilot the use of OpenText’s First Class software with students to allow project collaboration and student/teacher interaction to occur at home, school, or any other location providing access to the Internet. The goal of this initiative is to develop engaging learning activities accessible to all learners at any time and from any location. As we move forward with H1N1 Flu preparedness planning, FirstClass and other online collaborative tools will be critical to sustaining the continuous communication and file sharing between students, teachers and home in the event of partial, substantial, or total disruption to the instructional program due to H1N1.

Even though our district goals are not written "to raise ISAT scores", district scores on state tests continue to increase. Over 90% of our students consistently meet and exceed on the Reading and Math ISAT tests. Consequently, District 102 has consistently made "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) and earned Academic Excellence Awards each year from 2004 through 2008. The Academic Excellence Awards recognize sustained excellence in elementary schools where 90% of students pass the state tests for at least three years. We expect our fifth award of academic excellence following a review of the 2009 ISAT scores.

GRADE    READING    MATH
3rd         90.7%       98.2%
4th         95.8%       97.8%
5th         93.3%       97.2%
6th         94.9%       94.9%
7th         93.1%       96.4%
8th         96.1%       97.8%

The average 8th grade Fall 2008 MAP scores were equal to that of 11th graders in the norm group. We expect the Fall 2009 results to follow this trend. Additional information on NWEA's MAP test can be found on the Teaching & Learning Blog.

District 102 has made a conscious choice to formulate goals that will help achieve the vision versus goals explicitly written to "raise ISAT scores". Our Board of Education and Administration believe that our highly qualified staff is making the most authentic commitment possible to "leaving NO child behind" by learning how to respond instructionally to more formative classroom data, one child a a time, and working side by side with all members of staff and parents to do whatever it takes for every child everyday in every subject. The District vision is much more ambitious!