Champaign Unit 4 Schools is a district of 18 schools serving over 10,000 students in Champaign, Illinois. The district developed a robust strategic plan, setting a clear vision with measurable goals to improve student experiences and outcomes. Their plan identified a number of challenges they needed to tackle as a district. In addition to concerns about low student performance, particularly among some of their most vulnerable student populations, the district determined: 

• “We are lacking the basic building blocks of a high-performing education system: a coherent and demanding curriculum, assessments, and instructional methods all aligned to student performance standards.
• Our educators have few opportunities to learn with and from one another in structured settings.
• We rarely and/or unsuccessfully engage educators, families and students in helping us understand and address challenges in classrooms and schools.
• Our central office is not set up to manage change or implementation effectively – as a result, initiatives often fall by the wayside or are implemented ineffectively.” 

(Champaign Unit 4 School District Strategic Plan p. 2-3)

Three years into their strategic plan’s five-year lifespan, the district recognized that they were not fulfilling its promises. While the dedicated educators and leaders across the district worked tirelessly, the challenges their strategic plan was designed to address persisted. The district didn’t have a formal process for monitoring or adjusting its efforts toward implementing its plan or measuring its impact. There also weren’t any mechanisms for connecting stakeholders to the strategic planning process. Under new leadership, the district decided they needed to develop an infrastructure for aligning their efforts, monitoring their strategic plan, adjusting their approach if they weren’t seeing the impact, and engaging stakeholders across their community in the process.