At the June 9 board meeting, the Oak Park District 97 Board of Education unanimously approved a one-year, $131,950 contract for LeeAndra Khan to become the new principal of Brooks Middle School. Khan, 39, succeeds Mike Michowski, who resigned in April to work in another district. Khan will start July 1.
“I want to thank Mike for his dedicated service during the past three years, and wish him the best in his new position,” said outgoing Superintendent Al Roberts in a statement.
“I also want to welcome LeeAndra to the District 97 family. She is an innovative educational leader and tireless advocate for children whose passion, creativity and commitment to learning will build on the history of success at Brooks and help the school, its staff members and its students reach exciting new heights,” Roberts said.
Before her hiring at Brooks, Khan was the principal of Bronzeville Scholastic Institute, a high school with enrollment of less than 500 students that is part of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system. The school opened in 2005 as part of the city’s Renaissance 2010 measure, a plan that called for creating 100 new schools throughout the city — each of them classified as a performance, contract or charter school.
As a performance school, Bronzeville Scholastic is run by CPS teachers and staff who have more autonomy over the school’s budget and curriculum than traditional CPS schools. The high school is operated on five-year contracts, which may or may not be renewed, depending largely on students’ grades and test score performance.
For four years before joining Bronzeville, Khan was first an assistant, then interim, principal at King College Prep High School. Prior to her time at King, she worked as a math teacher at Whitney M. Young Magnet School for two years and at George Henry Corliss High School for a year.
Before her transition into education, Khan spent 10 years as a civil/design engineer for some prominent firms in the area, including A. Epstein & Sons, Patrick Engineering, and Parsons Brinckerhoff. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois Champaign
Khan said she was motivated to make the career switch after noticing a pronounced lack of women and minorities in the engineering field.
“As I moved from company to company, experience to experience, I noticed the disparity as it pertained to race and gender and felt like there was something that could be done on the ground level to encourage more students of color and more women to join fields in math and science,” she said in a recent interview.
“I thought that teaching would be a gateway to that and I felt strongly, with my content knowledge and application, that being in front of people who I looked like could inspire them to do things I’ve done,” Khan said.
The Chicago resident and mother of one said she applied for the position at Brooks because of her interest in Oak Park as a community and in D97’s middle-school format.
“I like the diversity in the community, I like the involvement of the community as it pertains to education,” she said. “The middle-school model is attractive to me as well. I believe my work in high school has been a lot around college enrollment, persistence and college match. I realized that [college preparation] starts much earlier than high school.”
Khan said she went through an exhaustive round of interviews and observations. She noted that two different groups of people visited her school, and she talked to about nine subsets of her colleagues.
John Gerut, whose son just graduated, and whose daughter is in the sixth grade at Brooks, was a part of the D97 team who observed Khan. He said the administration, after a few rounds of cuts, brought three finalists to a committee of parents, teachers and administrators. After a panel interview with each candidate, the committee virtually unanimously chose Khan for a site visit.
Kelly Flemming, a mother of two seventh- and eighth-grade boys at Brooks, was also in one of those groups of people who visited Bronzeville to observe Khan in action.
“You could tell they had nothing but positive things to say about her,” Flemming recalled. “I’m thinking, ‘How can they let her go?’ It was very eye-opening, very positive to see how students just passing in the hallway responded to her. She knew all their names. It was a very respectful, comfortable interaction — and that’s with adults they didn’t know.”
“There was a consistency about her [among the roughly 12 people] we talked to,” Gerut said.
Khan described her leadership style as one that emphasized student and teacher autonomy.
“What makes schools work is teacher leadership and student voice,” she said. “So when teachers own and lead the work, they have more buy-in and the work moves further, faster. And when students have voice and choice in what they learn, how they’re evaluated and how school feels to them, they have more ownership in it as well.”