Yorkville School District Seeks Community Feedback

Yorkville area residents can have a say about – and perhaps influence - the future of their local schools. The Yorkville Community Unit School District 115 has put forth an online survey with seven questions for community members to answer by May 26.

The answers will help the district's strategic planning process.

The survey asks users to pick among several options to answer questions about the district's challenges, important student skills and indicators of success, among other things. It also has two questions that allow users to generate a written response.

“The survey is important, because the feedback from the community and parents helps the Strategic Planning Team in creating a mission, vision, and goals that truly represent and reflect the community’s and parents’ hopes and wishes for their children's educational future, “ Superintendent Scott Wakeley said.

The strategic plan being developed will map out the next five years for the district, according to school board member Lynn Burks, who also is a senior professor at DeVry University.  The plan serves a number of purposes, she said, including:

• To define what the district is, what the district’s goals are and how it will accomplish those goals;
• To guide the district and bring focus to the district’s work;
• To communicate all of this to stakeholders.

“The plan sets student-centered measurable goals and allows the system to show over time how those goals are being accomplished,” Burks said. “It is a vehicle that we as a board can use to show the community what we are doing…and how effectively we have accomplished those goals.”

The survey was created by the Consortium for Educational Change based on feedback and data from the district’s first Strategic Planning Meeting on April 18. Some of the member districts of the CEC include: Barrington, Batavia, St. Charles, Glenbard, Glenview, Naperville, Deerfield, and LaGrange, said Wakeley.

The hope is that many community members, including those without students in district schools, will participate in the process.

“I believe schools are the nucleus of a community,” Burks said. “That being said, we are funded by our community’s taxpayers.  Even if you do not have children in the system, you do pay taxes, and the buildings and our grounds are public. Our public does use our facilities and we want them to continue to use them—learning does not and should not stop after high school."

"Finally, the quality of your school system will drive the quality of your community," Burks said. "We have a very supportive community, and we want to make sure our system best serves not only our parents, but our entire community – in terms of academic quality, lifelong learning and economic efficiency.”

The survey results will be provided to the larger planning committee, which is comprised of community members, teachers, staff, administration and board members.  The committee will meet once a month through August.

For updated information on the plan’s development, see the Strategic Planning page of the district's website.

“This process provides accountability for the completion of the plan that the community can see in order to understand what and why the District is implementing different reforms or initiatives to improve student learning,” Wakeley said.