Oak Park and River Forest High School will look to do a more formal rollout of its strategic plan with staff and the broader community starting this fall.
The plan was approved by the District 200 Board of Education in January. The plan was developed over a year and a half beginning in the fall of 2012. OPRF hosted a public kickoff celebration for the plan in April of this year. Among the goals outlined in the plan is improving racial equity among the student body.
Isoye said staff will have time to delve into the plan beginning in the fall.
“This year it’s more about just getting the word out. We’re going to begin to post the vision and the mission around the school. We’re getting use to the language. We’re planning for the beginning of [the] next [school] year to do a more in-depth activity to drill down deeper into the language of the strategic plan, so we can move forward at a different rate compared to what we had last year,” Isoye said.
The plan will be phased in over 5 years. After that period, the school will reassess where it is with respect to the plan, Isoye said.
The six goals outlined in the plan include specific action steps and initiatives to be implemented. Developing a long-term facility plan is among the action steps for the “facilities and finances” goal. Improving the transition of middle schoolers to OPRF, as well as graduating seniors’ transition to college, is highlighted under the “holistic community education” goal.
Isoye, who initiated the strategic planning process, called the document a “tool” to work with long-term rather than working with ideas that “come and go.”
Isoye added that he felt it was necessary for the high school to pursue a strategic plan. The last effort to create such a plan occurred in the 1980s but fizzled out, resulting in no plan.
“I felt it was important for the district to develop a strategic plan with large community input that the board wanted and I agreed was an important piece to this,” Isoye said.
“The strategic plan provides for direction,” he added. “It allowed us to sit down and rethink —whether the words were going to change or not — what our mission and our vision is all about, and to have the discussion that I think was necessary at this point. I’m really pleased with the fact that we have a plan; that we had the amount of community involvement and activity with it.”
Isoye said they’ll be regular updates to the board on the school’s progress, likely twice a year but it could end up being more.
“I think that, now, it is something for us to be able to wrap our arms around and begin to say ‘What does it all mean and how does it all fit together?'” he said.