3 candidates are competing for 2 seats on Peoria school board. Here's why they're running
PEORIA – Three candidates are vying for two seats on the Peoria Public Schools board.
Current board President Gregory Wilson, former school board member Dan Walther and newcomer Paris McConnell will be on the ballot June 28.
Paris McConnell
A Kansas City native who moved to Peoria when her husband, Mark McConnell, became pastor of New Cornerstone Baptist Church, Paris McConnell works as the community affairs manager with the Illinois State Treasurer's Office. She is the mother of three sons who attended Peoria Public Schools, where she has spent many hours as a volunteer.
“I was vice president for two years and then I served as PTO president for three years at Whittier,” McConnell said. “When my boys went to Calvin Coolidge, I served as vice president at Coolidge, and when they transferred into high school — they all attended Peoria High — I was PTO president there for three years.”
Though her youngest son graduated in 2019, McConnell still volunteers with the district. Being on the board would give her the opportunity to do more.
“I see some things in that district that I think that I can help,” she said. “To get some policies changed and get some things implemented."
McConnell is a staunch defender of the district. She says too much negative news gets reported about PPS, painting a picture that doesn’t properly represent the district.
“When I served as PTO president at Peoria High, I wrote media notifications about all the spectacular things that were going on with students,” she said.
McConnell is passionate about helping kids become better readers.
“I think that the district needs to hire specific staff for reading interventions for the schools that don't meet the benchmark," she said.
She is also interested in creating more opportunities for children to learn about Native Americans. McConnell is a descendant of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
“Now that Columbus Day is Indigenous People’s Day, I would like for us to have a celebration of all the tribal nations that are in this area,” she said. “There is just so much that we need to talk about, and no one’s really focused on that, so that’s one of my major goals, if I win, to get something together for Indigenous People’s Day and make it districtwide.”
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McConnell would like to expand the district’s Grow Your Own program to ease the teacher shortage. In her former job with the Illinois Department of Transportation, McConnell helped implement a program to recruit and retain engineers. She wants to use some of the same tactics to bring teachers to PPS.
“I think I can help them expand that to where it can actually work, and then when these teachers come, put them on a five- to seven-year agreement,” she said.
The Grow Your Own plan could also be used to help grow administrators who have a deeper understanding of the community than an outsider would.
“We take that Grow Your Own not only with teachers, but we need to grow our own administrators, too,” she said.
McConnell said she was a little torn when the modified school calendar was approved to go into effect in August. She thought it would have been better to implement it in 2021 to give kids more time to recover from the pandemic. But now that it’s been approved, she wants to give it a chance.
"Worst case scenario, if it doesn’t work, we can go back to the old schedule. But let's try it. Let’s see how it’s going to benefit the kids,” she said.
Dan Walther
Walther is a lifelong Peorian who attended Greely grade school and graduated from Woodruff High School. His four daughters graduated from Richwoods High School, and he currently has grandchildren in the district. Walther worked for many years as a teachers union representative, and after retirement worked as a substitute teacher.
Walther finished his first five-year term on the board after losing the seat to current District 3 board member Mike Murphy in 2021.
Walther has many goals for the district. One of them is to enhance the district’s International Baccalaureate Program at Richwoods High School.
“I would like to see it fully funded,” said Walther. “It’s truly one of the best things District 150 has going for them. We have people who pay tuition to go to the IB program. I call it the great equalizer. We have drawn kids from the parochial school program and places like Dunlap and other places that are actually paying tuition to go to that program.”
Walther also wants to see school board members participating in negotiations with the Peoria Federation of Teachers union.
“We're one of the few districts in the whole state of Illinois, out of seven or eight hundred school districts, that doesn’t have board members on the negotiating team,” said Walther. “Every other school district has board members on their negotiating team. We don't and it's weird because we're a large district.”
Walther wants to see the district’s Grow Your Own program expanded to help ease the teacher shortage.
“I think it would really help getting minority teachers within District 150,” he said. “And there’s also a shortage of paraprofessionals that, a lot of times people forget that part of it, but having a teacher assistant in the room does help the teacher. I think we need to address hiring paraprofessionals.”
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The war in Ukraine could provide an opportunity to fill some vacancies on the teaching staff, Walther said.
“We’ve got some very educated people from Ukraine that, I wouldn’t be opposed to us being a receptive city and bringing some of those people in ... and the state has made some accommodations for that,” he said.
Walther was opposed to the modified calendar, which was recently ratified by the board.
“We’re going to start in really early August, and that raises a number of problems because there’s only one other school district in the state that’s on this kind of schedule,” said Walther. “That’s going to cause some problems for us in a whole lot of ways, some of which I don’t think the district really thought out.”
Athletics will be impacted, custodians will be pressed to finish cleaning schools in a much shorter time period, and teachers and parents will have to deal with day care issues related to the new schedule, Walther said.
“This is an experiment, and it passed on a 4-3 vote. It could be changed back, but we've got a two-year time frame that they set with this,” he said.
Gregory Wilson
Wilson is finishing up a five-year term on the PPS board where he is currently serving as president. Wilson works as the community outreach manager at Illinois Central College. He is a native Peorian who lived in various communities growing up. Three of his five children attend Peoria Public Schools.
During his time on the PPS board, Wilson has not only helped the district navigate the tumultuous pandemic years but also challenged the district to make fundamental changes to better reflect the community. He garnered national attention when he suggested the district needed to rename schools honoring historical figures with complicated, often racially-charged, legacies. After much contentious debate, the district renamed five schools in March.
Wilson is running for a second term because he is a passionate advocate for students in the district.
“My experience mentoring and advocating for children has shown me that education is truly a life or death situation for many of our children,” he said. “Education is one of the most positive indicators to rise out of poverty, and achieve that American dream. ... We must provide our young people with the skills they need to rewrite their own stories, and I have the vision, passion and dedication to work with the community to make that happen.”
Wilson wants to see a fundamental shift in the way education happens, with the district moving toward an inquiry-based learning model.
“To continue offering the same educational opportunities that we have for years would be doing our students an injustice,” he said. “Developing inquirers means that students aren't given the answers, but they are given a voice, a choice, and encouragement to pursue their own questions along with feedback and direction."
Rather than presenting a set of facts, inquiry-based learning uses students’ interests to drive learning. Making the students more involved makes learning more relevant and encourages them to develop their own critical thinking skills, said Wilson.
He wants to see a blending of academic subjects.
“Right now, subjects are currently divided into discrete categories with limited overlap. ... As of right now, you have art divided, and music divided. ... You don’t get music inside of the art curriculum,” he said. “I would like to look at ways we can integrate things, and I think that would make it fun for teachers to teach. It’s a new way of looking at things."
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Another issue important to Wilson is having a procurement policy that promotes diversity.
"We have made a procurement policy to increase our participation in workforce goals for minority- and women-owned businesses to 25% and have also developed a new standing procurement committee to kind of oversee our procurement process," he said.
Continuing the district's effort to address the teacher shortage is also on Wilson’s list of goals.
“There is a national teacher shortage, but we can’t use that as an excuse,” he said. “I plan on evaluating the current approach that our district has taken ... and challenge them to do more. Furthermore, we need to develop sign-on incentive packages and examine increases in pay.”
Leslie Renken can be reached at 309-370-5087 or lrenken@pjstar.com. Follow her on Facebook.com/leslie.renken.
This article originally appeared on Journal Star: Peoria school board election sees 3 residents running for 2 seats
