Kaneland candidate questions opponent's email on school job involving son
In an Feb. 17 article, the name of Kaneland school candidate Pamela Voorhees was misspelled. And there are eight people running for the school board.
Kaneland school board candidate Tony Valente says candidate Gale Pavlak acted improperly when the board was hiring an athletic director last year, by asking via email why a current Kaneland dean - her son - didn't get the job.
Valente raised the issue during an endorsement interview with the Daily Herald and shared a copy of the email.
Pavlak said the email was just a way of making a point about Kaneland's practices regarding promoting from within, not about getting her son the post.
"That was what the main gist of what that memo was for," she said Monday.
Pavlak emailed all the board members several days before a March 2014 vote to hire a new athletic director.
Pavlak wrote that the candidate the superintendent was recommending, Peter Goff, was well-qualified, and that she was sure the Kaneland staff would be able to work well with him.
But, she wrote, she thought the board members should know two other people had been considered for the job. She did not state their names. Monday she confirmed one was her son, John.
In the email she described his experience, and his growing up in the district.
"This selection has stunned the coaches at KHS and will be questioned in many areas of our communities. This individual has the support of our district, current coaches, previous head coaches, and a previous athletic director. Besides a background that put this individual in the final selection, he also bleeds 'black and silver' which was one of the many requirements that our district indicated was very important," Pavlak wrote in the email.
" ... The question is: What are we saying about our current employees who have worked to move up the ranks and often don't make the selection? And what does it say about Kaneland's ability to prepare these individuals for the next step? Do our employees have to leave this district to get ahead? It will be our responsibility on Monday evening to vote yea or nay. The reason you are getting this ahead of time is so that if you have questions, opinions, etc., you can direct them to our superintendent. Unfortunately we usually don't have this information ahead of time for candidates from our district that are applying for positions - especially for the final selection. This time we do."
She voted to hire Goff, as part of an overall personnel changes memo.
Pavlak used the phrase "bleeds black and silver" to describe her son, a dean at the high school, in a separate endorsement interview Feb. 11.
Pavlak sent the email from her personal account to the personal accounts of other board members. She said she was told afterward she should not have sent it en masse, but to one or two board members at a time. Valente said the mass email was a violation of the state's Open Meetings Act.
"The issue is we are not supporting our own employees first," Pavlak said.
Valente was once principal of Kaneland High School. He was elected to the board in 2011.
He has pushed for a nepotism policy, saying last year that Kaneland was practicing "Chicago-style politics" when it hired the daughter of the teachers union lead negotiator for a job as an aide.
The board is considering a policy.
"Mr. Valente is grasping for anything. If there is one person on that board that is disrespectful it is him ... he has got an ax to grind," Pavlak said.
Eight people are running for four spots on the Kaneland board. The others are Peter Lopatin, Teresa Witt, Dan Nagel, Jerry Elliott, Ryan Kerry and Pamela Voorhees.