New state superintendent of education aims to bring his accessible approach to ISBE
Tony Sanders’ office in the Illinois State Board of Education’s Chicago headquarters in the West Loop doesn’t yet have that lived-in feel as he has occupied it only for a few months. Still, there are several framed pictures on the walls of Sanders surrounded by Elgin District U-46 students.
Before taking the helm as state superintendent of education in February, Sanders led District U-46 for 11 years.
“I miss the kids. One of the things I’ll have to figure out as I develop my schedule is how to get into schools more frequently,” Sanders said. “These guys are the reason. I brought these (pictures) with me … being around the students is always grounding and why you’re doing the work that you do.”
For someone sitting in the state’s top education job, Sanders has an unassuming easiness about him that’s demonstrated by the ISBE employee lanyard he wears around his neck, likely a holdover from his days in the public school system.
Sanders stepped into public education in the early 2000s as the chief communications officer for St. Louis Public Schools after he spent 15 years working in communication and governmental relations for Illinois, including at ISBE.
It wasn’t a straight shot though.
“I never thought I would end up in public education. I wanted to be on the radio,” he said of his dream of being a DJ. “And so I went to school to get my degree in communications. And I got that dream when I was 19 — my first job on the radio. And I spent about two years on air and then I realized there’s no real money behind this.”
While he didn’t have plans for a prestigious career in education, one might say it was fate.
Sanders was born in New Mexico, where his father was a deputy superintendent. When Sanders was 9 years old, his family moved to Nevada so his father could step in as the state superintendent of education in Nevada. Then, when Sanders was 15, they moved to Illinois, where his father held the position Sanders holds now.
“This was not at all my planned trajectory,” Sanders said. “But serendipitously, I ended up back in the same role that my father had.”
With his family stationed in Springfield, Sanders worked at various state agencies every summer doing temporary work. After receiving his bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois at Springfield, he was offered a job as an appraisal specialist at the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, auditing credit hours for cosmetologists, nurses and doctors.
Sanders said he took every job as an opportunity to learn, no matter how small the job was.
“At the age of 12, I had a paper route. At 14, I worked at a hardware store. I’ve done apartment maintenance, was a limo driver and a DJ. I worked in fast food,” Sanders said.
In leaving U-46, where his career grew exponentially, Sanders said it was bittersweet because his family still lives in Elgin and his children graduated from the district.
As the new state superintendent, Sanders is responsible for helping schools, students and educators recover from the COVID-19 pandemic as federal relief funds are expected to expire by 2025. He also inherited an education climate wrought with divisiveness and culture wars across school boards.
“If you go back in time, there were certainly some controversial issues that resulted in some screws in my tires,” Sanders said. He recalled giving a transgender student at U-46 access to the gym locker room of that student’s choice, which created havoc in the community among people who disagreed with the decision.
“It was probably one of the first big political issues that I had to face as a superintendent. But I just stood on doing what was right by kids, and slept fine at night knowing that that’s what I was doing,” he said.
As far as the pandemic is concerned, he said, “There was no way to make what everybody would consider a good decision.”
District U-46 was one of the few in the state that stayed remote for a longer period of time and continued masking all the way until the governor’s mandate was lifted.
Sanders said the pandemic was a critical point in recognizing the importance of meeting the needs of students, and not just at the academic level.
“I’m more worried about the social-emotional gaps that we’re seeing versus the academic gaps,” he said. “I actually think it existed before the pandemic; we just were not as attuned to it as we are now.”
Sanders noted that during former State Superintendent Carmen Ayala’s time in office, the board of education added social-emotional hubs through Illinois’ regional offices of education to support teachers in trauma-informed practices.
In 2014 as superintendent at U-46, Sanders created Dream Academy, an alternative high school in Elgin, to reduce expulsions and provide students with trauma-informed care.
The school has 14 programs with an average class size of 15 to 18 students tailored to kids whose social, emotional and academic needs have made it difficult for them to learn in the traditional school environment.
Sanders also said the need for more social workers in the school setting isn’t an isolated issue.
“By and large we need more social workers. We need more counselors. We had a lot of vacancies at U-46 and many of them were for social workers, counselors and even certified school nurses,” Sanders said. “So you can’t detangle the teacher shortage from all these other issues that students are facing. It’s just it goes hand in hand.”
At a March news conference at Streamwood High School, Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced a new initiative aimed at alleviating chronic teaching staff shortages across Illinois with a proposed Teacher Pipeline Grant Program that would give $70 million per year over the next three years to the 170 school districts with the most needs and teacher vacancies.
Those districts have 80% of the unfilled teaching positions in the state. Filling them would improve the student-teacher ratio for over 871,000 students, Pritzker said.
Sanders, who was present for the announcement at his former district, said the systemic inequities in the most under-resourced districts are exacerbating the teacher shortage.
“We can’t ignore the needs of our teachers. Part of the teacher pipeline issue is trying to make sure that we’re meeting the social and emotional needs of our adults as well, making sure that they have access to services,” Sanders said. “I recommend to everybody on my team that counseling is good for you. Counseling is an appropriate step. Don’t ever be afraid to do it.”
Sanders stressed that there are over 3,000 vacant teaching positions across the state, adding that U-46 wasn’t immune to staff shortages. He said he stepped in several times to substitute teach classes as a result of an increase in retirements and a slowdown in hiring.
Sanders, who was known for frequently dropping in at U-46 schools, said students weren’t in school on the day of Pritzker’s teacher pipeline program announcement, otherwise “they would all come up and ask for my autograph.”
He laughed while noting that it was common for kids to take selfies with him or tweet at him.
Angelica Harris, a senior at South Elgin High School and a student adviser to the board, said even before she worked closely with Sanders as a liaison between students and administration, she had heard about his tendency to walk around school hallways chatting with kids.
“We knew him as someone that was always at football games, always at big school events. He wasn’t afraid to talk to students,” Harris said. “He once told me that every time he visited a high school, he would always ask students who their favorite teacher was, and then he would go on and kind of acknowledge the teacher and send them an email and say thank you to them.”
Harris often gave input on decisions that were being made for students, and Sanders was always open-minded, she said.
“I don’t think that there was ever a time that I felt uncomfortable bringing up a topic that may or may not have been controversial or something that I knew students noticed or needed to change,” Harris said. “He was always welcoming and he always wanted the information so he could act accordingly.”
Sanders emphasized the need for a diverse educator force, citing the work of U-46′s Grow Your Own program that allowed any paraprofessional, bus driver or support staff member who wanted to become a teacher in the district to return to school, with tuition covered.
“We saw a really diverse pool of individuals who had that desire to be a teacher but were never inspired to go back to school to get a degree in teaching,” Sanders said, adding that the initiative was one way to chip at the glaring gap between white and minority educators. “We need to think through multiple strategies to address the demographic makeup of our teaching force. But the biggest thing we have to do is change the perception of our teachers. We really need to get back to uplifting the teaching profession and making sure our teachers know that we value and respect them as a profession.”
Along with the Teacher Pipeline Grant Program, Pritzker also recently promised to provide free preschool to all Illinois children in his second term.
In Illinois, children are not required to attend school until age 6. U-46, like many districts, only recently added full-day kindergarten, an initiative that was overseen by Sanders.
“I do understand the logistic challenges,” Sanders said. “It’s going to be different in every school district because the needs are going to be different. But where there is a will, and there is funding, there is a way.
U-46 has shifted middle schools to a sixth, seventh and eighth grade model beginning in 2025, which would then open up space in elementary buildings to begin expanding early childhood opportunities.
As it stands, U-46 has preschool programs in 10 buildings across the district that are funded by state grants, some half-day and some full-day, said Katie Cox, director of U-46′s Early Learner Initiatives. At least 125 children are on a waitlist for free pre-K, she said.
Weaving in and out of serious conversation about the state of education in Illinois to the things he misses most about his previous job, Sanders said he’d make it a point to attend Friday night football games or big school assemblies.
His former colleague Brian Lindholm, chief of staff at U-46, remembers spending an entire day with Sanders in 2018, doing things described by his then-boss as “the perfect day.”
“We started out at an elementary school greeting kids as they got off the bus and then popping in and visiting in classrooms,” Lindholm said. “We ended up later that morning at either a middle school or high school and had lunch with a bunch of kids. And then it got to be like the end of the day and I’m exhausted — and Tony tells me that he was now going to stop by each football game in the district.”
Lindholm said students picked up on how genuinely interested Sanders was in hearing about their day.
“It was just a big deal when he would show up and they all wanted to make sure that they could take a selfie with him and tell him the latest thing that was happening either at school or outside of school,” Lindholm said. He also pointed to graduation day, which Sanders said was one of his favorite days of the year.
“We have about 3,000 kids per year graduating in our district, and it was just amazing how many of the 3,000 that Tony knew by name,” Lindholm said.
As U-46 superintendent, Sanders was accessible to students and staff alike, even to parents and members of the media. With a bit more red tape surrounding his new role, he said he’ll do everything in his power to keep that up.
His biggest hope, after he completes a 90-day listening and learning tour across the state, is to revisit the reason he stayed in public education.
“Even if it’s on the way home on a Friday night, I’d like to stop by and see a school play or something,” Sanders said. “Being in schools is what brings energy to all educators, and I can’t imagine not being in classrooms as often as I possibly can. And I’m encouraging everybody at the state board to do the same.”
