District 117 forms committee for district-wide re-boundary process

By Gary Scott on April 27, 2017 at 7:23am

A committee has been formed for a local district-wide re-boundary process.

Jacksonville School District 117 Board members and Superintendent Steve Ptacek discussed forming a committee for this re-boundary process as well as mission statements and charged messages for that committee at last night’s special meeting.

While Ptacek and the board had originally discussed having a community committee to make decisions in regards to the process, they eventually decided that having the School Board members be that committee would be more beneficial to the process and the community.

Ptacek explains why the thinking changed.

“I think it would be much more challenging to find people that are absolutely representative of community voice when this could be a very personal issue. I think that it’s a very different situation that the Vision 117 project. The board members are the elected officials by the community, and my recommendation to the board was that they be the final governing body making the decision about this,” says Ptacek.

Ptacek says that community members will certainly still be involved in the process.

“We are going to have feedback surveys for everyone who attends these meetings to be able to provide their feedback. Everything is going to be published, we’ll be developing a separate web page, we’re going to be doing multiple surveys from the community, so the community is going to be very involved, very engaged in the process and very knowledgeable about what’s going on. Being a highlight transparent process is mandatory for this to be successful,” says Ptacek.

Ptacek says ultimately, however, that the board will make the final decision.

The board has been charged with completing and passing a final plan by regular board meeting in December of this year, with that plan to be implemented by August of 2018.