Joliet Township HSD 204 board adopts strategic plan updates, advances four new action plans

The Joliet Township High School District 204 Board of Education on Tuesday accepted a progress report on its multi-year strategic plan and voted to adopt four action plans that administrators recommended for implementation next school year.

District Superintendent Dr. Guzman told the board the district has “a lot to celebrate while we still have a lot of work to do,” summarizing two years of work since the plan’s adoption and highlighting community engagement, student advisory work and growing career and technical education offerings.

The board approved the progress update and adopted action plans 1.2, 2.4, 3.4 and 4.1 (as laid out in the district packet). Board members discussed multiple action-plan topic areas during the presentation, including: expanded community engagement and a new student advisory committee; curricular and dual-credit expansions tied to career and technical education; restorative practices and microaggression reporting; special education and multilingual services enhancements; postsecondary planning and rollout of SchoolLinks; attendance monitoring and chronic-absence interventions; safety upgrades including access-control and a hall-pass system; and study of a revised school-day schedule with a daily flex-time period.

District staff and plan leads said some individual action plans will be moved to “operationalized” status (indicating substantial implementation), others will remain “in progress,” and several new action plans are being recommended for adoption next year. Chris McGuffey, who led parts of the instructional update, said “expansion is in the works” for additional courses, internships and a curricular audit tool slated for summer work.

The presentation drew brief public comment earlier in the meeting when Brian Gortner, director of the 3 Rivers Education for Employment System, thanked the district for its career and technical education programs and singled out district staff for support. “You have programs to be proud of,” Gortner told the board.

Board members asked for continuing progress reports and said several items — notably the proposed school-day changes and some attendance interventions — will require further stakeholder work and bargaining-unit discussions before implementation. The board unanimously approved the strategic-plan progress report and the four recommended adoptions.