Alton School District Outlines Goals for 2025-2026 School Year
The District Improvement Plan has three main priorities, and the district plans to track their success in new ways this year.
ALTON - During their regular meeting on Aug. 19, 2025, the Alton Community Unit School District #11 Board of Education learned about the District Improvement Plan and initiatives for the 2025–2026 school year.
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Superintendent Elaine Kane and Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services Rene Hart shared that the district administrative team spent multiple days over the summer reflecting on data, goals and priorities.
Hart reiterated the District Improvement Plan’s three strategic goals: creating a culture of belonging, grade-appropriate instruction and assignments, and effective professional learning communities (PLCs) that drive results. The district believes they have the right priorities identified in these goals, and the next step is to act on these goals.
“You plan something, you do it, you study the results, and you act on those results,” Hart explained. “So that cycle is a continuous repeat, and we’re really excited to start a brand new year of that cycle and continue refining our strategic goals.”
Kane said the new “layer” for this year is to focus on lag and lead measures. Lag measures, also known as “autopsy data,” is information that you can’t change by the time you get it.
For example, one goal is for students to meet or exceed expectations on the state assessment. Students take this assessment in April, and the district is still waiting to receive the comprehensive results. By the time they receive the results, there’s nothing they can do to change these results.
Conversely, a lead measure refers to “something we can check along the way, that we know we can influence,” Kane said. A lead measure example would be a certain percentage of students scoring 80% or better on their unit assessments throughout the year. As the district tracks this data, they can adjust their work to influence it.
“If our lead measures are improving, then we can anticipate some improvement on our long-term lag measures,” Kane added. “As we report out on those lead measures, we know that can be more motivating and can really improve our experience of efficacy.”
Hart noted that these measures start at the district level and “cascade” down to the individual student, and the administration has outlined specific goals to match each priority in the District Improvement Plan.
The district wants to create a culture of belonging, and one way to measure this is to reduce student chronic absenteeism, which is a lag measure. As a lead measure, the district will monitor the percentage of students present every day.
The second goal — grade-appropriate instruction and assignments — can be monitored by the lag measure of improving the percent of students who meet or exceed on the state assessment by 10%. The lead measure is helping students score 80% or better on common assessments throughout the year.
The end goal for the effective PLCs is to increase graduation rate by 5%. The lead measure is to measure the percentage of fourth through 12th graders passing all classes.
The district will monitor these lead measures throughout the year and share those results with the Board of Education.
“We know people play differently when they’re keeping score,” Kane said. “That’s what the lead measures are about. It’s about essentially keeping score. It allows us an opportunity to celebrate progress and celebrate when we’re doing well and to correct when we need to.”
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