I am a public school district administrator in Community Unit
School District #300 in Carpentersville, Illinois. We are located
approximately 40 miles northwest of Chicago. We are a large preK-12 unit
district with an enrollment of approximately 15,000 students. The school
district has 19 sites. As a large unit district we encompass a great deal
of demographic diveristy. Sites range from 75% low income and 40%
non-English speaking households to less than 1% low income and no
non-English speaking households.
Each site has a school improvement team made up of administrators,
staff, parents, community members, and in some cases students. Each site
develops aschool improvement plan for which the site is fully responsible
for implementing. Each site mangages its own budget, hiring practices,
staffing, curriculum development and instructional monitoring. Our system
has practiced this form of site-based management and shared decision
making for the the past seven years.
My colleague and I have each had about 20 years experience
teaching and as building administrators. We have been given a special
assignment this year to develop a "Partnership for Accountability" by
which outside observers would visit each site to provide information
toward school and instructional improvement. Tied to this is a
transformation of the central office function to that of a service
provider and the district as a whole to a true learning organization.
We are using concepts and ideas from Senge, Wheatley, Deal, Bolman
and others in this endeavor. We are very interested in sharing ideas,
learning, and networking. Specifically we are seeking ideas from other
organizations who have had experience with the changing role of central
office functions in a decentralizing process and process quality
indicators which may be used by community-based observational teams to
provide added value to schools for improvement.
I look forward to the dialogue!
Steve Renne srenne@d300.kane.k12.il.us
--Steve Renne <srenne@d300.kane.k12.il.us>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>