Voters in La Grange School District 102 will elect three School Board members in April from a choice of four people who want to serve.
Three currently serve on the District 102 School Board. Incumbents Edward Campbell, Michael Melendez and Dorren Gertsen-Briand will share the ballot with Jessica Mandra.
Even some of the candidates said the choice may be a difficult one.
“I’m not sure what differences you would use to differentiate us,” said Campbell, during an online candidate forum conducted by the League of Women Voters of the La Grange Area. “That is a good thing. The candidates are four people really devoted to public service,” he said.
Campbell, who lives in Brookfield, said he is running for a second term to finish the work that was started during his term, such as curriculum changes the district started before the pandemic interrupted those plans.
There also is a “steep learning curve” for newcomers to the School Board, Campbell said. He spent the first two years of his four-year term going home after a meeting and looking up acronyms that were used to find out what they meant, he said.
“I want to use what I now know,” Campbell said. “We were very close to the next generation science standards being implemented and were on the verge of having solar panels installed on some of the buildings. We have major contracts coming up.”
Michael Melendez, who is the current School Board president, agreed “there is a lot of unfinished work.” He looks forward to a thorough evaluation of the curriculum.
Melendez and his wife have lived in Brookfield since 2012 and have four children, a 6th-grader, a 4th-grader, a kindergartner and a 2-year-old.
Gertsen-Briand of La Grange Park, who was selected in November from a pool of applicants to fill a vacant seat on the School Board, is running for a full four-year term.
Gertsen-Briand, whose experience includes five years on the La Grange Park Library Board, is a homemaker with a son at Lyons Township High School and a 3rd-grade daughter at Ogden Avenue School in La Grange.
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She believes her 20-year career in museum administration developed skills in creating alternate forums of education and instruction, similar to how schools adapted during the pandemic.
Mandra, who works at Harper College as a communications designer, believes her communication skills already have helped the district and will be an asset if she is elected to the School Board. She helped start the district’s use of saliva screening tests, Campbell said, and had materials for the school Parent Teacher Organization printed in Spanish.
Mandra, who lives in La Grange Park and has a 3rd-grader at Forest Road School and a “soon to-be kindergartner,” said she also helps lead Harper College’s diversity plan.
Candidates, including Melendez and Mandra, said they will continue to support the district’s equity plan, which is posted on the District 102 website.
The district also is considering offering language instruction in the younger grades, not only because of its positive effects on the developing brain, Campbell said, but because learning other languages and “being able to bounce back and forth between them doesn’t do anything bad for your vocabulary and your ability to operate in your primary language.”
Gertsen-Briand said the district also needs to return to exploring class size and space constraints at some of the schools. Teachers and students have gained experience with remote and online learning that may offer new options to address those issues, she said.
“We can be creative,” Gertsen-Briand said.
Melendez said, although there are no guarantees, his goal is to have students back in the schools for full days of in-person instruction in the fall.
“Science does show that kids are not the super-spreaders (of the coronavirus) we thought they were,” Melendez said. Vaccinations seem not only to protect people against contracting coronavirus, but also prevent them from spreading it, he said.
The local transmission rate is very low, and the Centers for Disease Control is forecasting that it will continue to go down, Melendez said, “so there are a lot of positive things in our favor.”