The president of the Orland School District 135 Board intends to resign Monday night to focus on his recent promotion to assistant village manager of Orland Park.
Joe La Margo, 45, began working for the village in 2006, was elected to the school board in 2009 and became board president in 2013.
“When I ran for the school board originally my intention wasn’t so I could run for higher offices or anything, I ran because I had children in the district, and I didn’t like the direction the district was going in,” La Margo said Thursday. “I believe that I’m leaving the district in a much better position, but I couldn’t have done that without my fellow board members.”
Laura Berry, the board’s vice president and a retired District 135 administrator, will lead the board’s October meeting in La Margo’s absence and appears to be a strong candidate to take over as president. The board will also determine who replaces La Margo, who was elected to a second four-year term in April.
La Margo, who was Orland Park’s deputy clerk and public information officer, was hired to the $116,000-a-year assistant manager post in July.
He said he knew then that the policymaking aspect of being a village administrator would force him to leave the school board, but he postponed his departure while the district worked through some serious busing problems at the start of the school year last month.
“It was always something I was planning on doing,” La Margo said of his impending resignation. “It was just a matter of when.”
He said District 135 has resolved “98 percent” of the problems that drew hundreds of complaints of late and no-show buses during the first two weeks of school. The new bus company, Positive Connections, is hiring more drivers, and the district’s former company, American School Bus,, was brought in to take over 30 problem routes.
The school board will vote Monday on a 2015-16 budget that keeps the district’s financial reserves near the middle of a range of 45 to 55 percent of annual spending that the La Margo-led board adopted as a formal policy.
La Margo had claimed that the board’s previous leadership had “hoarded” money while raising the district’s property tax levy.
While heading the board, he pushed to provide every student in the third through eighth grades with a take-home computer and the board did not increase the tax levy during his tenure.
As for unfinished business, District 135 is negotiating a new teacher contract to replace the one that expired July 1, and La Margo will not have a vote on whether Superintendent Janet Stutz stays beyond the June 30 expiration of her three-year contract.
Stutz was vetted by the previous board, and, with La Margo leaving, there will be no one on the board who was there when she was hired.
Patrick Guinane is a freelance reporter.