District 211 Superintendent Lisa Small to retire in 2025
Palatine-Schaumburg High School District 211 Superintendent Lisa Small will retire in 2025, after what will have been five years at the helm.
Though the board of education approved her retirement date Thursday, it did not act on a proposed one-year contract extension needed to get her there that also was on the agenda.
“We do ask that they give us the four-year notice,” District 211 board President Anna Klimkowicz said. “Would I like her to stay a lot longer? Yes, I would. This has been a challenging year for any superintendent, much less a first-year superintendent.”
She did not say why the board didn't act on extending the contract past 2024, other than that its appearance on the agenda may have been premature.
Schaumburg resident Jessica Hinkle, who ran unsuccessfully for the school board in the spring, spoke during public comment at Thursday's meeting about the agenda item on the proposed contract extension. Emphasizing she wasn't personally attacking Small, Hinkle suggested a superintendent's performance should be evaluated on the basis of a more typical school year than the last one.
Klimkowicz said that was one aspect of Hinkle's comments she could agree with, though she believes Small rose to the unprecedented challenge of dealing with so many competing priorities during the pandemic.
“In my opinion, she's done a great job of balancing it as best she can,” Klimkowicz said of Small.
Small was District 211's associate superintendent for instruction when the school board chose her as its superintendent in the fall of 2019. She was given a four-year contract with an initial gross annual salary of $246,000 that began July 1, 2020.
Small has served in District 211 for 29 years. Before her six years as associate superintendent for instruction, she had been principal of Fremd High School in Palatine for six years. She began her teaching career at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in January 1992 before coming to District 211 as a math and science teacher at Hoffman Estates High School in August 1992.