Strategic Plan 2013-2018 - Oak Park and River Forest High School

excellence of the school, provide equity and excellence for all students, and respond
responsibly to the needs of our community. In essence, a strategic plan is a road map of
priorities for what to do and how to move forward.
This strategic plan includes 37 action steps in five critical areas of focus: Holistic Community
Education; Equity; Supportive Learning Environment; Transformational Teaching, Learning,
and Leadership; and Facilities and Finances. Delineating these areas with discrete action steps
is a way to break down the work into manageable pieces. But the ideas we developed for
various areas overlapped, ran parallel, and, in some situations, felt like similar responses to
different needs.
Collaboration, not Isolation
Our work should not be addressed in silos but instead must stress collaboration. Thus, we have
deliberately left in areas of overlap within the action steps and details, to show that they were
identified as priorities in multiple areas of focus. Improving communications, for instance,
specifically is mentioned among the action steps for Holistic Community Education;
Transformational Teaching, Learning, and Leadership; and Facilities and Finances. During
implementation, these separate threads may be woven together into a single communications
plan. Another crucial aspect of implementation will be examining the plan as a whole to
determine how best to allocate dollars and resources.
Each of these high-level action steps is further divided into substeps that contain benchmarks,
providing data-oriented measures for each step. We recognize the long-term nature of the
implementation of this plan. We have set forth steps we believe are both ambitious yet
attainable. We recognize that in five years our work will not be complete, but will be in need of
review and, if necessary, redirection.
6 • Oak Park and River Forest High School District 200 Strategic Plan