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4 | November 3, 2016 | The frankfort station News
frankfortstation.com
Superintendents share ideas, learn from each other at forum
Rebecca Susmarski, Editor
Education funding, standardized
testing and other
issues took center stage during
a roundtable discussion
among area superintendents
Friday, Oct. 28, at the Frankfort
Public Library District.
Sen. Michael Hastings,
who has hosted the superintendents’
forum twice a
year for four years total, led
an open discussion in which
local superintendents could
voice their opinions on current
education laws and policies
at the local, state and
even federal levels. Roughly
nine superintendents representing
Frankfort, Mokena,
New Lenox, Tinley Park, Orland
Park, Homer Glen and
Lockport, among other suburbs,
attended the event.
Hastings said he chose to
host the meeting at the Frankfort
library’s “beautiful facility”
because of the “important
role” libraries play in communities
and how much they
aim to partner with schools.
He added that over the years,
the forum has allowed participating
superintendents to
see both the differences in
how their districts operate
and where they find common
ground on many issues.
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Sen. Michael Hastings leads the discussion during his
superintendents’ forum Friday, Oct. 28, at the Frankfort
Public Library District. Rebecca Susmarski/22nd Century
Media
is when you bring everybody
together — and some of these
people are from different political
persuasions — they
learn from each other best
practices,” Hastings said.
“It’s a non-hostile environment
where you can be collegiate,
you can speak your
mind ... and it helps me do
my job better as a senator. I
told these guys earlier, ‘I may
not be an expert on every
area of the law, but you are,’
so I’m smart enough to know
to go to the experts when I
don’t know.”
Hastings introduced
roughly seven topics and
gave the superintendents a
chance to discuss them before
he reached the concluding,
general Q&A session.
Some of the topics included
Illinois’ transition from ACT
to SAT testing, the impact of
PARCC testing, the implementation
of Senate Bill 100
— which required elementary,
secondary and charter
schools to adopt certain pupil
discipline policies by Sept.
15, 2016 — and education
funding reform.
In general, the superintendents
expressed “almost
99.9 percent” approval for an
evidence-based funding formula
when it came to education
funding reform, Hastings
said. Instead of taking funding
from high-performing
school districts and redistributing
it to low-performing
ones, the evidence-based
funding formula — defined
in Senate Bill 1403 — would
set a prototypical cost for
every student and focus on
factors such as student need,
class size and tutoring programs
to determine how
much funding each district
receives.
New Lenox School District
122 Superintendent
Peggy Manville stated her
belief that school districts
would like to know for certain
if major funding reform
would take place, so that they
could plan and allocate their
resources in advance. Tim
Baldermann, superintendent
of Union School District 81,
expressed his support for not
using property taxes as a basis
for a school funding formula,
as he believed it would
not allay the State’s fiscal
issues and would only place
a burden on taxpayers at the
local level.
He also stated his support
for reform that would
not take funding from some
school districts and redistribute
it to others.
“They’re going to lose
money with education funding
reform one way or another;
there’s no doubt about it,”
Baldermann said of high-performing
school districts. “We
shouldn’t be dragging down
high-performing schools in
an effort to try to prop up lowperforming
schools when I
don’t personally believe that
throwing money at a school
district has anything to do
with their performance.”
The superintendents also
generally expressed disapproval
for PARCC testing as
a tool for measuring student
success, Hastings said. He
agreed with the superintendents
on PARCC party due to
to the lack of correlation between
high ACT scores and
low PARCC scores, he said.
In between topics, some of
the superintendents discussed
how the impending deadline
of the State’s stopgap budget
has affected their districts
overall. Kara Coglianese, superintendent
of Homer Community
Consolidated School
District 33C, said the budget
impasse caused her district to
create its own funding ratios
and formulas to create more
equity for the district.
She added that the uncertainty
of the State’s budget
beyond the stopgap has
restricted her district from
planning some programs,
since the staff does not know
how much money will be
available in the future. While
Coglianese said her district
supports the Common Core,
she also felt the budget issues
seep into the effectiveness of
using standardized testing to
measure student success.
“I would say me, personally,
I would like to have the
money at the state level be
eliminated so the school districts
can send it back to the
local districts for testing, and
using standardized testing to
make sure that our students
are growing adequately,” Coglianese
said. “The PARCC
testing and even the ISAT
testing, the turnaround time
was just not helpful and not
viable to schools, and there’s
a lot of time that’s been taken
away from [helping] students.
... I think we as a state
need to start looking at some
other options about what’s
not working anymore, especially
at a time when we
don’t have any money.”
During the forums, Hastings
also invites experts to
come in and offer additional
educational resources to the
superintendents. He asked
staff members from the
Laynie Foundation and the
Frankfort Public Library District
to come on Oct. 28, and
he invited a vice president
of Microsoft to come in and
present in the past, he said.
While such resources can
be helpful, Hastings mainly
hosts the forum to help “cultivate
these relationships”
among area superintendents
and gauge their opinions so
he can do his job better, he
said. Coglianese, who had
been invited to the forum for
the first time this year, said
she enjoyed the opportunity
to meet neighboring superintendents
and see that they
face many of the same issues.
“I really, really appreciate
the senator and his ability to
bring us all together,” Coglianese
said. “It is nice to know
that our senator and our representatives
are interested in
hearing what we have to say
and are bringing that message
back.”