Planning
Strategic Plan
Reaching, Engaging, Inspiring
Strategic Plan for 2023-2028
Dear Union Community:
It is with great pride that we present to you this Strategic Plan for the next five years, 2023-2028. We are extremely grateful to everyone who participated in this strategic planning process. It was especially important that we gather the thoughts of our students, parents, teachers, staff, and community, having met the challenges of the last five years. There were many events we could never have anticipated, but we met them head on, “the Union Way.”
The basics of our previous plan have not changed. Our vision, “REACHING — ENGAGING — INSPIRING,” remains the same. We believe that every student has the right to a high-quality public education, and we are committed to our mission of “100% Graduation, College and Career-Ready.” Our core strengths in early childhood, community schools, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), and college and career readiness will continue to power us forward into the future. We have made some minor adjustments to our district’s instructional philosophy, including hope, engagement, relevance, and critical thinking.
Union continues to adapt to the changing needs of our community and students. The transformation of our 6th and 7th Grade Center, the centerpiece of our recent $152 million bond campaign, is well underway. Investments we have made in safety, technology, and new programming – including the expansion of our Construction Academy, a new Aerospace Academy, and the genesis of a Medical Academy – are providing our students with even more pathways to success.
I am truly honored to serve beside a talented and highly committed staff. We received confirmation of that excellence by having one of our own, Rebecka Peterson, named the 2023 National Teacher of the Year. Our dedicated Board of Education remains unwavering in our mission and in the success of your child. We place a high value on the trust and support of our families and the Union community. We appreciate you!
Superintendent Dr. John Federline and the Board of Education
Strategic Plan
Core 4
Union Public Schools supports a Core 4 environment in its district: relevance, engagement, hope and critical thinking.
- Relevance - Connecting learning to the present context and future
- Engagement - creating a learning environment that is interesting, challenging and enjoyable.
- Hope - fosterinh pathways of opportunity and developing student potential and purpose for pursuing goals.
- Critical Thinking - developing the ability to solve problems, evaulabe ideas and communicate effecrtively.
2023-2028 Strategic Plan Update
June 13, 2026 - Dr. Todd Nelson, senior executive director of Research, Design and Assessment, presented the Board of Education with an update on Union’s 2023-2028 Strategic Plan. He highlighted some of the accomplishments related to district objectives and showed some of the trends related to indicators being used to track progress.
Departmental Accomplishments
- Child Nutrition
- Dietitians taught 423 nutrition education classes ranging from Elementary to Secondary from 2023 to 2025.
- All 13 elementary schools participated in the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program grant, valued at about $500,000 annually. Child Nutrition continues to provide locally grown foods as a part of all menus – local beef, lettuces, tomatoes, potatoes, watermelon and more.
- Communications: In developing a campaign to address chronic absenteeism, the Communications department won two Silver Link awards from the Tulsa Chapter Public Relations Society of America: One for the overall campaign and another for “Creative Collateral” for the campaign posters.
- Finance: Continued to receive national recognition for financial reporting excellence recognized by:
- GFOA Certificate of Achievement
- ASBO Certificate of Excellence
- ASBO Meritorious Budget Award; and
- For receiving unmodified (“clean”) audit opinions annually.
- Human Resources
- Increased student teachers by 14% over the past two years
- Increased number of loan forgiveness approvals every year; and
- Maximized the tuition reimbursement program for the past three years.
- Information Technology
- IT employee Billy Roe was named the Employee of the Year
- Installed a next-generation firewall and reconfigured security profiles for the district
- Operations
- Core America: the third-party custodial assessment firm graded the district at a 93% average. Following the evaluation, recommended practices for improvement were immediately implemented.
- More than 60 construction projects have been completed during the past five years.
- Transportation
- Transported about 9,500 students each day to and from school with 66 routes.
- In addition, there were 19 afterschool routes and 21 families were transported as part of the McKinney-Vento program.
Measuring District Progress
According to Nelson, the district tracks several indicators to measure the district’s progress.
- School Health Indicators: “These are measured through our school capacity surveys and are scored on a scale from one to six,” said Nelson, and are an indicator of the overall trend of school health. “The scores generally show a positive trend, especially when compared to 2022.”
- Graduation and College Matriculation
- The primary indicator of progress is the district’s graduation rate. “While the gains have been significant since 2021, there remains some work to do as we climb back to the pre-pandemic level of nearly 93%,” said Nelson. In 2024 and 2025, the graduation rate has been 88.7% and 87.5%, respectively.
- The percentage of students enrolling in college has dropped but has “leveled off with a slight increase to 54% with the 2025 cohort,” according to Nelson.
- Attendance: “While the results aren’t dramatic, the downward trend has ceased and the tide is turning,” said Nelson. Chronic absenteeism has dropped from 29.7% in 2023 to 27.5% in 2026.
- Reading and Math on Grade Level (K-9 Math and K-12 Reading): Nelson said we are seeing steady growth in math and significant gains in reading. He attributed much of the success to Early Release Fridays and the work of professional learning teams.
- College Readiness Course Completion
- Middle School: Several years ago, Union began systematically assigning 5th grade students to advanced classes in 6th grade. “By assigning students who showed potential on assessments in math and reading to advanced classes (with the option for parents to change it back), it resulted in increased enrollment in advanced classes (from about 3,500 to about 6,000, in grades 6-8),” said Nelson.
- Grades 9-12: The long-term effect of that consistent action has led to the growth in college readiness course participation by high school students — over 13,000 semester courses in 2026.
Teaching & Learning Accomplishments
- The Learn to Read “100 Percent Proficiency by First Grade” Goal is getting primary focus as the implementation continues.
- On the elementary math state tests, Union had the highest percentage point increase of all large districts in the state in 2025.
- To support our Community Schools philosophy, parent liaisons were added to several secondary grade levels.
- After school programming in elementary schools has expanded to 543 program opportunities serving over 3,500 students.
- The expansion of elementary robotics programs included hosting the regional competition which led to four teams qualifying for the state tournament. This is fueling the further growth of the STEM pathways in middle school.
- The Hope Department developed the Educational Leadership course.
- About six million points of communication occurred on TalkingPoints, the texting software that translates messages into the 60+ languages that our families speak. (About one million were direct messages to parents. 90% of our parents engaged in 2-way communication, well above the 55% that is typical of districts our size.)
- New STEM course offerings with Paxton-Patterson learning modules were added at the middle schools levels.
- Using the NoRedInk software, the number of secondary student writing samples submitted has grown to more than12,000.
- There is large growth in in enrollment in AP and Advanced Science courses.
- Affirming the work of the Reach Program staff, the student pregnancy rate hit an all-time low of just 4 students in 2024-25. In 2014-15, there were 38.
- Special Services established the Redhawks RISE Transition Program.
- Union received a 6-million-dollar federal grant called Project Inspire that is a cooperative with OSU and two other school districts to provide mental health support and address the national shortage of school psychologists.
- The College and Career Center had over 16,000 students in attendance at CCC events in one year alone. During the 2024-25 school year - over 50 organizations hosted 125 student interns who earned 740 certifications.
- Career pathways were expanded by launching new career academies (e.g. Aerospace, Construction, Medical).
- New industry partnerships were forged in healthcare, aerospace, and construction to enrich the career pathways – bringing more career panels, internships, and partner-driven programs.
- We established Guiding Coalitions of teacher-leaders at every school to enhance the focus on student learning as they lead the work of the professional learning community.
- Union was honored with the Breakthrough School Award from the Oklahoma Public School Resource Center as the state’s top district in our category when evaluated on a variety of achievement indicators.
“While we press on knowing there is more work to be done, we are encouraged that the intentional and systematic efforts to create opportunities and cause learning are making a difference,” said Nelson. “We will keep our foot on the gas until all students experience high levels of growth in learning, resulting in graduation and a promising future.”
Board Members Hear Report on Union’s Strategic Plan
February 12, 2024 - Dr. Todd Nelson, senior executive director of Research, Design, and Assessment, provided the Board with an update on the district’s Strategic Plan for 2023-2028.
“Union is a district known for proactive innovation, a commitment to excellence, a devotion to the needs of students and the achievement of high expectations,” Nelson said. “We have completed the objectives, actions, measures, and timeline for the new plan that is designed to keep us on course. It will present us with new opportunities for our students while supporting a strong and healthy culture among our staff. We will continue to pursue progress toward our mission of ‘100% graduation, college and career-ready.”
Nelson shared the plan’s Strategic Pursuits in five focus areas, which provide guidance for leadership policy decisions and the development of initiatives, programs and strategies:
- Teaching & Learning;
- Partnerships;
- Human Capital;
- Business/Operations; and
- Culture.
Altogether, 40 strategic objectives have been combined into a single document, with organizational overlap supporting multiple areas. Strategic objectives are accompanied by actions steps and a timeline for completion, as well as performance measures to track process.
It will be updated on an annual basis and serve as a guide as we move forward over the next five years.