Blazing New Trails - Connexions

Name
Exton
Gateway
Experiences with PTELL in Six Illinois School Districts: Leadership Perceptions and Student Performance 287
Sundown Ridge
New Prairie
Millennium
Haptowne
Table 1. Participating School Districts.
Type (Grade Level)
High School (9-12)
Enrollment
783
Description
High % of low-income students
High School (9-12) 1,067 Low % of low-income students
Elementary (K-8) 166 Negative rate of EAV growth
Elementary (K-8) 682 High rate of EAV growth
Unit (K-12) 700 High rate of EAV growth
Unit (K-12)
366
Negative rate of EAV growth
Note: All districts names are pseudonyms provided to protect confidentiality. Enrollment data was from 2005
and was taken from the Interactive Illinois Report Card (2005). Retrieved February 3, 2007 from
http://iirc.niu.edu. Information on EAV growth rates was obtained from the Illinois Local Education Agency
Retrieval Network (2005). Retrieved May 20, 2006 from
http://webprod1.isbe.net/ilearn/ASP/LstARCDData.asp.
As can be seen in Table 1, the districts that participated in the study represented the three
types of school districts that exist in Illinois. The description of each district supplied in Table
1 indicates the characteristic that served as the basis of its selection for the study. Two
districts of each type were paired for study based on their contrasting descriptions. All field
work was conducted from late 2006 through early 2007.
Selection of participating districts was purposeful, driven by two criteria. One was the
need for proximity to the researchers; as a matter of practicality, all districts studied would
need to be within a reasonable commuting distance. The other was that all districts be located
in low-growth counties. PTELL allows a taxing body to take full advantage of new
construction only in the first year it appears on the tax rolls. The effects of PTELL in counties
experiencing a robust level of new construction would be mitigated. Since comparisons of
new construction data proved to be very difficult to obtain, the researchers used population
growth rate as a proxy indicator for the amount of new construction in a county. The five
counties in northeast Illinois (Du Page, Kane, Mc Henry, Lake, and Will) in which the state
originally imposed PTELL exhibited higher rates of population growth, both individually and
as a group, than the adopter counties in Central Illinois (Illinois Statistical Abstract, 2003),
with the lowest average growth rate in the data available at the time was falling between one
and two percent. This fact led the researchers to limit selection of participating school districts
to those located in Central Illinois counties with average growth rates of less than one percent.
The result of the numerous criteria employed was a discriminate sampling approach, fully
intended to maximize the potential learning of what PTELL meant to school leaders in
Central Illinois school districts (Strauss & Corbin, 1998).
The researchers contacted the superintendent of each selected school district to gain
permission to conduct research in the school system and to seek their informed consent to be
an individual participant. In one district, the business manager was the primary participant
since he had the primary financial decision-making role. Each primary participant was asked