The school board for Valley View School District 365U appeared poised to welcome two new members after the April 7 election, while retaining the school board president.
Unofficial tallies showed incumbent board president Steven Quigley taking about 24.5 percent of the vote.
His running mates on the “Friends of Valley View” candidate slate, Diane Parro and James Boudouris, also appeared to have secured a board seat, garnering about 28 percent and 24 percent of the votes.
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Sally Guilbo, a former Valley View teacher and Romeoville resident, got about 23 percent of the vote.
She trailed Boudouris by 120 votes after April 7, but said she would wait and see how many provisional and absentee ballots fall her way April 21 before conceding.
Still, Quigley said a few days after the election that he was confident those numbers would hold.
“I don’t think there’s enough absentee or provisional ballots out there that I need to worry about,” he said.
Just 14.92 percent of Will County’s 393,088 registered voters cast a ballot in the April 7 race.
Quigley said the new board members will be sworn in once the election results are finalized April 21.
He praised Parro and Boudouris for the different attributes they will bring to the board.
Boudouris is an insurance agent who Quigley said will bring a finance background to the board “that will be very helpful.”
Parro has been involved in the district in a variety of ways for years, he said, and will bring a breadth of knowledge and experience to the position.
Parro said before the election that her two children attended Valley View schools. Parro also said she was a district substitute teacher but would leave the position if she was elected.
Quigley said the new candidates would be sworn in during the first meeting after the election results are confirmed, which would be the April 27 meeting.
Nominations would then be made for board president, vice president and other positions.
Vice President Rick Gougis, as well as board member Leo Venegas, will leave their positions once their successors are sworn in.
Gougis said he decided not to run, while Venegas’ nomination petition was disqualified by county election authorities after a Bolingbrook resident challenged the validity of some signatures on the petition.
Quigley said that he wasn’t surprised by the disqualification, but that he hoped Venegas and Gougis would still be able to volunteer for the district’s other committees.
“Everybody knows that if you do this stuff, you file at least 25, 30, 40, 50 more signatures than you need,” Quigley said of Venegas’ situation. “I don’t know how he collected his signatures, but if you don’t know who’s signing your petitions, you should make an effort to find out.”
Going forward, the district will continue to grapple with potential shortfalls in state and federal funding, Quigley said.
“We’ve lost millions of dollars over the years from various programs that have been reduced or cut back,” he said. “We want to keep moving the district forward, challenging the students, challenging the administrators, challenging the educators, to provide the best education that we can.”
Twitter: @JournoGeoffZ