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Urbana SD 116 reviews equity action plan, highlights achievement gaps and attendance challenges
Summary
The Urbana School District 116 board heard a Year 1 equity-action update and school improvement reports showing persistent achievement gaps for Black and Latino students, progress on staff retention and mentoring, and ongoing concerns about chronic absenteeism and special education changes.
The Urbana School District 116 Board of Education on Monday received a Year 1 progress update on the district's equity action plan and a sequence of school improvement reports from building administrators that together underscored achievement gaps and continuing attendance challenges.
The equity presentation, led by district staff, summarized the district's multi-decade work on race and access and laid out five strands of action: systems (policy and accountability), teaching and learning, student voice and climate, professional learning and family-community engagement. The systems strand reported targeted retention and recruitment work for so-called hard-to-fill positions — notably special education and multilingual roles — and cited high return rates among prioritized staff: "out of 117 special education and dual-language staff members, 91 percent are returning for the 24-25 school year," presenters said.
Why it matters: District leaders framed the action plan as an accountability framework intended to narrow disparities that data show remain large. A district data presentation highlighted that groups of Black and Hispanic students lag their peers on multiple assessments and that growth measures for some subgroups remain low, giving the board a rationale for targeted strategies and for aligning staff development and curriculum choices to equity goals.
Several strand leaders described concrete programs. The student-voice leader, Donardo Williams, credited an internal mentoring program with improving mentees' attendance "more than 20%" and reducing suspensions for participating students. The professional-learning strand said the district expanded multilingual and LGBTQIA professional development and added contract language to compensate teaching assistants who stay after school to participate in building-level PD. The family-engagement strand said it will continue small "family cafe" conversations at the school level and use Panorama and 5Essentials survey data to track progress.
A public commenter pushed the board on one specific operational change. Julie Duvall urged greater transparency about special education assignments and said "SPED is kind of being dismissed," referencing discussions about moving some programs between buildings. Board members and administrators acknowledged the concern and said they would follow up with additional information and clarify what decisions are pending.
Principals reported mixed results on school improvement measures. Early-childhood leaders said they met attendance targets and showed gains on classroom-based vocabulary and early-math checks; elementary principals reported stronger math growth after adopting Illustrative Math but noted some winter-to-spring declines for literacy growth. Several principals stressed that chronic absenteeism continues to be a primary barrier, with the district's chronic-attendance threshold cited as 10% (about 18 days).
Board members discussed how the equity work links to the district's strategic priorities, and administration said the equity policy language under review is intended to provide a permanent accountability framework. The board later voted to approve a set of policy changes discussed at the meeting.
What happens next: District leaders said Year 2 goals and more specific, measurable actions will be presented in the fall; board members asked administration to provide comparative retention and aggregated data to help contextualize the strand-level progress.
