Glenbrook District 225 hopefuls, incumbents discuss pandemic, transparency

This story has been corrected to note that Paul Kelly believes District 225 undervalued in-person learning.

Current leadership or new voices?

Four openings on the Glenbrook High Schools District 225 school board will be filled at the general consolidated election on April 6. The Daily Herald on March 11 held a pair of remote forums featuring candidates for those positions.

Participating in the first forum were Albert "Bo" Herbst III, Paul Kelly, Mai Lin Noffke and Dr. Carol Schmidt.

In the second were current District 225 Board President Bruce Doughty, Vice President Peter Glowacki, incumbent board member Dr. Sonia Kim and Michelle Seguin.

Board candidates David Hochberg and Matt O'Hara were not present.

The candidates addressed questions primarily on transparency of communications, issues surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, and mental health.

"It's easy to send out the summary of the board minutes, it's easy to send out bullets on something, but when you actually try to engage in a dialogue, engage in a conversation, it becomes much more problematic," said Herbst, a global managing partner at the Heidrick & Struggles executive search firm.

"One of the things I noticed with the board dynamic over the recent past is that they seem to have delegated too much of their authority to the school administration," said Noffke, a Northbrook attorney. "They became a ratifier of the administration's decisions rather than providing strategic and strong directives to the administration."

In the latter forum, Glowacki noted that the pandemic "strained a lot of resources." He and Kim, director of marketing and commercialization education at Northwestern, both believed transparent communication was an area where the board could improve. Glowacki, though, said the volume of email communications increased 120% over a normal school year.

Seguin, chief revenue officer for Audira Labs in Northbrook who said she volunteered with Northbrook District 28's strategic communications committee, thought the board actually produced a large amount of communication for parents.

"The board meetings are virtual. I don't know how much more transparent you can be, honestly," she said. Doughty agreed that a "silver lining" of the pandemic has been remote board meetings have served more people than ever before.

"That's very healthy for any kind of democracy," said Doughty, a Princeton graduate seeking his third term on the District 225 board.

Two of the four candidates from the first forum said they likely would not have run in this election had there been no pandemic. They were unsatisfied with aspects such as lack of consideration on mental health, no uniform guidelines for teachers' medical accommodations and being too late to hire instructional supervisors.

Kelly acknowledged that District 225 administration presented a detailed plan, but believed there was a delay in establishing metrics that would facilitate the plan.

"Several months went by where we still didn't know exactly what those indicators were and what the thresholds were. We had no goal, we had no idea, we had no vision of how we were going to be able to get back into school," Kelly said.

He said the existing board "undervalued" the in-person learning option. Herbst later suggested teachers should have been assessed as to whether they were more effective as in-person or remote instructors, and that the board should have hired more instructors based on those findings.

"I would have changed the (2020) summer school curriculum to try and offset the disaster of the spring," said Schmidt, an ophthalmologist. "And similarly this summer, I've looked at the summer school offerings and there's really no difference between what is offered this summer and what's been offered in the past ... I would have looked at curriculum shifts."

The District 225 Learning and Operational Plan for the 2020-21 school year was presented July 27, 2020. Kim and Sequin both praised the flexibility of a system that currently offers both in-person and remote learning, as families see fit to return to school

"From Day 1 we were committed as a board, parents, community members, to bringing everyone back safely," Glowacki said.

In early January, a survey of district families found 37% of Glenbrook North students willing to return to in-person learning, and 35.5% of Glenbrook South students. Since weekly mandatory saliva tests have been instituted for in-school students, that number is now up to more than 50% districtwide, Doughty said, "and more of them are coming back every day."

He said the district also had to wait for information from governing bodies.

"As a board we stood up and did what we had to do," Doughty said.

"In difficult circumstances, ones we've that never seen," he said, "I believe the board did what it needed to do to lead through this pandemic with all of the difficulties and dislocations understood. It is not a perfect process and we never expected it to be, but we stood up when we had to and we are now at a position where our kids are getting closer and closer back to the normalcy they and their families so crave."