Naperville District 203 joined the American Association of School Administrators’ Learning 2025 network of demonstration systems, a group of school systems focused on providing student centered, equity focused, future driven education. 

The network provides a senior consultant who will advise the district, a monitoring process, and meetings with “cohorts,” groups of schools. The cost to join was $14,000.

“All of the senior consultants have been superintendents and have been successful superintendents,” program director Debbie Magee said. “There’s also the piece that’s the network. Not all superintendents have had a background in early education so if you haven’t, you may not be great at making changes to early learning.”

District 203 is currently working on a blueprint for a future plan to improve the social emotional learning, equity and future driven aspect of the district.

“[Superintendent Dan Bridges] got some feedback from our community, from our students, [and from] our principals on where they believe our priority should be in these three areas,” said Jayne Willard, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction. “And then what he will do is create a strategic blueprint from that. We will share that with our senior consultant.”

There have not been any changes made following District 203’s participation in the network, Willard said, but administrators are looking into working on it.

“A few years ago, we implemented an SEL curriculum,” Willard said. “Now, we know we want to go back and really think through that curriculum and say ‘what’s the best way we can support students socially and emotionally?’ We need to look at our curriculum to make sure our students feel represented within our curriculum.”

The Learning 2025 network required an application to join and the application takes approximately 15-20 minutes to complete, according to its website.

“[The network] is an application based network. So this was something that we had to complete a pretty extensive application [for],” Willard said.

About 60 school districts were chosen to be part of the network, and almost every application was accepted, Magee said.

“Was every school accepted? I’d have to go back and look but I would say I would say almost yes. Maybe 100%,” Magee said.