“You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.”
– Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States

Success in Deerfield Public Schools District 109 is due to a team effort! All hands on deck is often heard, seen, and lived in our schools. The students, their parents and grandparents, our business community, the teachers and educational support staff, our administrators, the Board of Education, essentially everyone deserves credit and should take pride in the State of our District!

We are proud to share our video message:

Since 2013 Deerfield Public Schools District 109 has been on a change trajectory towards excellence, improvement and success. Taking direction from the mission verbs Engage, Inspire, Empower, our teams have been doing just that!

In District 109, the 2015-2016 school year has been an exciting one of change and great growth for students, teachers and staff. With our focus on the Big 5, together we continued to reach our mission to engage, inspire and empower our students — our entire community — to excel and contribute in a changing world.

The Big 5 are:

The Illinois New Learning Standards (also called Common Core State Standards)

• Over the past two years K-8 staff have worked together to create curriculum maps aligned to the standards.
• Teachers and administrators work together on the new standards based reporting models.

Technology

• In the 2nd year of 1:1 the district invested in teacher training and support.
• Based on the data from the BrightBytes surveys the district has purchased resources to improve digital citizenship lessons and has opened up innovation grants for teachers for next year.

Support for teachers

• Deerfield University is going strong this year with more than 1050 digital badges awarded for staff completing “courses” at our six “digital campuses”. Four of our teachers have completed all coursework and they have graduated from this online, voluntary professional growth program.
• The first year of our new teacher mentor program was highly successful. This year we have spent significant time on the planning for early release Wednesday next year.

Organizational climate and culture

• The third year of the culture survey shows that nearly 95% of all district employees are highly satisfied and engaged and two of our schools reached 100%!
• Each school developed action plans based upon the student engagement survey data. The student voice also guides our work..

Superintendent’s Task Force on Middle Level Education

• This year’s science lab construction, 8th grade choice in electives, and refreshed music curriculum reflect the continued impact of this Task Force.
• The Task Force reach now extends to all schools with the summer construction of new libraries and the PTO funded SMART labs in the K-5 schools.