Coming together in Unity

One of first districts to hold visions meeting

The name of this small school district in northwest Wisconsin says it all: Unity.

After all, that’s what the WEAC Great Schools project is all about – bringing the community together to discuss its schools and identify the factors that make schools great ones, and to identify the barriers to keeping them great.

In the Unity School District, which is based in Balsam Lake, the community has taken a big step forward by embracing the Great Schools initiative. In fact, the Unity School District is one of the first in the state to reach the School-Community Visions phase of the Great Schools process. On March 6, about 40 educators, parents, citizens, and community leaders came together for an evening at Unity High School to share their visions for their schools.

“We had a really nice mix of people with a lot of different ideas,” said Dan Beck, a high school teacher who serves as the local Great Schools communicator and was instrumental in organizing the meeting. “We got a lot accomplished.”

The School-Community Visions session is a key element of the Great Schools project. It serves as a springboard for future steps for maintaining and improving the quality of education in the community.

At the Unity meeting, people made a variety of suggestions, ranging from decreasing class sizes so that more individualized instruction can take place, to putting directional signs up in the school building so that visitors can more readily find their way around.

“It was like hiring an interior designer,” Beck said. People who spend their days in the schools tend to take certain things for granted or get so caught up in their routines that they stop looking for new approaches to problems. People from the outside – like an interior designer – bring unique perspectives and ideas.

The meeting was very positive, Beck said.

“This was about dreaming about what we want and staying away from why we can’t have it,” he said.

The next step, he said, is to take the ideas generated at the SCV meeting and present them to the School Improvement Team (SIT), a pre-existing work group that serves as a clearinghouse for all the other various committees and task forces that are examining issues in the district.

“We’ll start assigning the ideas to the committees and groups and teams that already exist,” Beck said.

In fact, the existence of these committees – and the School Improvement Team – made it much easier to implement Great Schools and is a key factor why Great Schools has progressed so far so fast in Unity.

“When Great Schools came about, it was very much like the kind of thing we’ve been looking at and trying to do for the last couple of years,” Beck said. “It wasn’t a huge leap into new territory, and that’s probably why we’re where we’re at.”

Another reason is that Unity has a positive get-things-done attitude.

“There’s an awful lot of people here who really do want to see something change for the better and, if given the opportunity, are willing to do what they have to do to see that it happens,” Beck said.

“People who are too negative are really in a minority around here. I think it makes all the difference in the world. Here, it’s the negative people who are afraid to speak out, not the ones who think something good can happen.”

Unity also has received a great deal of assistance from Great Schools staff – in particular Pete Roller and Karen Alexander – and from the WEAC Communications Division, Beck said.

Although the Great Schools process involves a lot of work – including the one-on-one interviews with members and surveys – it’s well worth the effort, Beck says.

“It’s a scary thing to ask people what they think because, God forbid, they might tell you. But it was definitely a very positive experience for everyone who was there. It did not become a bitch session. That’s not what it’s about, and that did not happen,” he said.

The Great Schools process has only begun in Unity, Beck said.

“I assume this is going to be the first of a lot of this type of thing. The list of suggestions from this first meeting could keep us busy for 20 years.”

Posted April 11, 2000