A woman who served two terms on the Western Springs Elementary School District 101 board will in April try to unseat one of three incumbents running for reelection to the school board of Lyons Township High School District 204. Heather Alderman served on the District 101 school board from 1995-2003, spending four years as board president.
Should she win one of the three open four-year terms on the ballot, she would be the only woman on the LTHS school board. But she’ll have to prevail over one of three incumbents who are well known and well established as board members. Two have been on the board since 1995, while another has served since 1989.
“It’s always good to have a new set of eyes looking at things,” said Alderman, who works part time as an attorney at Burr Ridge-based Grasso, Bass & Williams P.C. A defense attorney, Alderman represents professionals in malpractice cases.
“I think I’d bring variety to the board,” she said. “I’m the only one who’s served on an elementary board. As an attorney, I have experience in negotiations and legal issues.”
Alderman has a son who is a freshman at the high school, and said that her experience with LTHS has been “very, very positive.” With respect to ongoing issues like student achievement and communication, Alderman said “those are always something the district can improve on.”
Running against Alderman, are incumbents Dr. John Polacek, Arthur “Bill” Sprague Jr. and Todd Shapiro.
Polacek is the senior member of the trio, having served on the District 204 school board since 1989, including time as its president. A 1960 graduate of LTHS, Polacek is a dentist who has practiced in LaGrange Park for that past 35 years. He has had two children graduate from the school.
Polacek said that his main motivation for running again is to keep the district’s budget balanced and continuing projects, such as the improvements to both the north and south campuses, which were funded by bond issues.
“In the next five to eight years you’ll see a lot of districts going out for referendums, but you won’t see that at LT,” said Polacek, who’s been a member of the board’s Finance Committee for his entire tenure. “[Improvements to the campuses] have all been done without raising taxes.”
Shapiro, a LaGrange Park resident, was elected in 1995 along with Sprague. The chairman of the board’s Curriculum Committee for the past six years, Shapiro said that he’d like to focus on partnering better with the LTHS’s feeder districts.
“The more we have common goals and common objectives, the better off we’re going to be,” Shapiro said.
One of the ways the district can do that, he said, is through “data-driven decision making” where the high school can track the achievement of students from a particular district and give that data back to the feeder district.
“They can look and see how they performed,” Shapiro said. “We can share that information back with all of those districts, and perhaps persuade them [to participate in] a common thought process or joint projects.”
Sprague, a former LTHS teacher who worked at the school for 25 years and was chairman of the Social Studies Department, said the next four years will see the board tackling issue of improving math and reading scores. He also said the board would like to encourage students to take one or two more challenging courses in order to experience the kind of academic rigor they’ll see in college.
The next four years will also see the board working to recruit a new superintendent, Sprague said. Dennis Kelly, who has been superintendent since 1992, will be retiring in 2009. The recruiting drive will likely begin in early 2008, Sprague said.
District 204 includes Brookfield south of Southview Avenue, which lies in Lyons Township. All Brookfield residents north of Southview Avenue are part of Riverside-Brookfield High School District 208.
Brookfield has not had a representative on the LTHS school board in well over a decade.