•   FACILITIES MASTER PLAN

    The District has embarked on the visioning of its future through the recent completion of its Strategic Plan and its current work on the Academic Master Plan. To ensure continuity with these two critical components of the District’s vision, the work on the Facilities Master Plan has commenced and the Plan has been completed, presented to the Board of Education, and approved to proceed. As with the previous work, we sought community engagement. We have completed a total of 34 community meetings: 1 -  Future’s Conference; 5 – Steering Committee Meetings; and 32 Community Dialogue meetings/events (2 days of 8 meetings each, 2x during the process).  The details of the completed community engagement are outlined below.

    1) Future’s Conference (Feb 26th).  This initial community meeting of employers, education partners, government and community support organizations, philanthropic and faith-based groups, and other vested parties will help us to launch the outreach effort to secure community understanding of the District’s goals and objectives and how critically important it is to have community support throughout the process.  From this group, we secured several local organizations that provided representation on the Steering Committee.  We did not always get the Executive Director of an organization to participate on the Steering Committee, but many did stay engaged throughout the process.

    2) Steering Committee (7 meetings throughout the process). This diverse group representing the broader community and District 11 staff will do a significant amount of work.  Its membership included those listed for the Future’s Conference and those that may not have been able to participate. Senior citizens, students, alternative education pathway partners, charter school representatives, elementary, middle, and high school parents and administrators, District Accountability representation, and other community partners will be pursued. This group should be diverse, providing multiple perspectives on the work that needs to be done by this committee. This committee will do a significant amount of work focusing on District data to help frame the discussions with the broader community and help to build consensus on a pathway forward. The committee’s work will also be the basis for the survey questions that we will make available to the broader community in early May.

    3) Community Dialogue. There were two sets of Community Dialogue Days that encompassed multiple meetings on each given day: a few meetings in the morning, one at lunch, and more in the evening. Due to COVID-19, the meetings were held virtually, with start times staggered to allow for the Superintendent and/or his team to provide the introduction and context for the community meeting(s). Staggered times will allow for community members to select a time that best suits their schedule; encouraging greater community access and participation. We also facilitated Facebook real-time meetings. Over the course of two days, we facilitated 16 community meetings.

    The community meeting output was provided back to the Steering Committee to help direct their work. The Steering Committee incorporated the ideas, issues, and concerns of the community and help build robust options to bring back to the community for further input and refinement. The same type of community dialogue was used for round two, over two days at multiple times.

    We enjoyed the community conversations that assisted in reimagining D11’s future, its schools, its classrooms, and its learning environment for its students.                                                 


                   vinn