EDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been updated from an earlier version to correct information about Gertz and Mellman’s work experience, villages of residence, the number of candidates removed from the ballot and to clarify the data regarding PSAT performance and behavior at OPRF.
Nate Mellman and Josh Gertz said they’ve taken a “divide and conquer” approach to organizing their District 200 Board of Education election push.
Mellman, a judge for the U.S. Social Security administration from River Forest, and Gertz, a lawyer from Oak Park specializing in advising on employee benefits, are running a joint campaign. They now account for 2 of the 5 on-ballot candidates after challenges they filed successfully removed another candidate from the ballot on procedural grounds.
With four seats up for grabs in April, at least one of them will win a place on the board supervising operations at Oak Park and River Forest High School, barring a successful write-in campaign.
Mellman is the father of two OPRF graduates and one current student, while Gertz’s children are not high school aged, but he intends to stay in Oak Park at least until they’re able to matriculate through OPRF.
“I’m looking forward to, you know, making a better place, hopefully in time for my kids because I’ve got three young future Huskies at home,” Gertz said. “One of the parents at my kids preschool said, ‘I know this guy Nathan Mellman, who’s looking for other people to run along with him on a slate’ and he put me in touch with Nate and, you know, we met and touched base and turns out we do have a lot in common. It’s been really great from a divide and conquer perspective as well to have a partner to do this with.”
Gertz and Mellman are a united front across several issues, including eliminating the detracking system used for freshman students, enforcing tougher student discipline policies and keeping the school’s wide ranging facility upgrade projects on budget.
“We both think that all kids should be challenged, that we need to keep all of our kids safe and that we should be good stewards of taxpayer money,” Mellman said. “I think we’re on common ground with the vast majority of residents of Oak Park and River Forest. We plan on running on those issues and winning on those issues.”
The duo’s shared campaign website touts dips in PSAT performance by OPRF freshmen and figures showing a rise in in-school altercations over the last decade to support these campaign priorities.
OPRF freshman’s overall performance on the PSAT dipped slightly after the pandemic, going from an average score of 1,005 in 2019 to 990 in 2023, according to the data Mellman and Gertz obtained from the district. The pair attributes this dip to D200’s adoption of a detracked freshman curriculum for history, English, world languages and science ahead of the 2022 school year.
While detracking has only been in place at OPRF for two full school years, Mellman and Gertz believe the experiment has already failed.
“OPRF traditionally was a very high achieving high school, I mean, it still is a very high achieving high school, but I think its performance has taken a turn a little bit in the wrong direction,” Gertz said. “There’s increasing gaps between it and some of the highest achieving schools in the state and we attribute that at least somewhat to the detracking program that’s been implemented for freshman year. While it seems there may be some intention to expand it, I think it’s had a negative impact on students at every performance level and we’d like to return to trying to challenge all students and to push them to the best of their academic potential while simultaneously still making sure that there is equity and that we are preparing students that might not have had such privileged upbringing to succeed in in high school.”
OPRF leaders strongly refute Mellman and Gertz’s claims about the detracking program, both because of how young the program is and because of the data itself.
“We will need several years of data to fully understand the effects of this particular initiative, however the data we do have simply does not support this claim,” Karin Sullivan, OPRF’s spokesperson, said. “On the Evidence Based Reading and Writing portion of the PSAT 8-9 and PSAT 10, taken by all freshmen and sophomores each year, academic outcomes have clearly not declined. In fact outcomes have remained very consistent since we launched the detracked freshman curriculum in the 2022-2023 school year, both overall and within demographic groups.”
According to the school, freshman and sophomores, across racial demographics, who’ve been educated under the detracking curriculum have seen their performance on the PSAT either hold steady or improve slightly in English compared to pre-pandemic levels when measured by what percentage of students meet or exceed state standard.
PSAT scores have fallen for some groups of freshman and sophomores in math when compared to pre-pandemic levels.
On the discipline front, the pair has argued that OPRF’s Behavioral Education Plan is too lenient particularly on students who’ve brought weapons to school. According to data the pair obtained from the district, of the 19 students found with a knife or firearm on campus from 2018 to 2023, only one was expelled.
“There are some kind of glaring gaps in the school’s current safety procedures, and there have been an increase in altercations on the campus, which is troubling and distracting from a student’s learning experience,” Mellman said. “We’re not doing them any good by having these watered down consequences, only for them to realize when
they become an adult, that if they do the similar actions, that there are indeed real consequences in society. So we need to take a look at the behavior education plan.”
OPRF also refutes Mellman and Gertz characterization of violence inside the school. Sullivan said altercations involving students and incidents of students making threats dropped by roughly 50% since the 2021-22 school year, the first full in-person school year after the pandemic last year. While there were 91 such incidents in 2021-22, there were only 46 in 2023-24.
Sullivan also pointed to the SB100 state law that required Illinois schools to restructure policy in a way that minimized automatic suspension and expulsion policies.
“SB100 specifically states that school boards may not institute zero-tolerance policies requiring administrators to suspend or expel students for particular behaviors,” Sullivan said. “At OPRF, most instances where a weapon is found or alleged to be present in the building involve no threat to self or others. These instances most commonly result in out- of-school suspension in addition to student supports. Of the 20 incidents since the
2021-2022 school year where a weapon was either alleged or found to be in a student’s possession, two warranted referral for expulsion.”
There have been 42 altercations involving students or incidents of students making threats at OPRF so far this year, according to data obtained by Mellman and Gertz.
In addition to sharing those priorities, Mellman and Gertz say both their candidacies were sparked at the same time, during one of the most controversial episodes of OPRF’s 2023-24 school year.
Both men were part of a cohort of community members accusing the school of tolerating antisemitism in the aftermath of the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023.
“You know this is why people run for elected office, especially at the lower level offices, cause something gets them going, gets the juices flying,” Mellman said. “I think it drove me to investigate some other issues that I view as problematic with the way the district responded and interacted with the public.”
While Mellman was among the most publicly vocal members of the group, calling for several teachers to be fired over allegedly pro-Palestinian social media posts during a school board meeting last year, Gertz was a supportive observer. Mellman also submitted a complaint against OPRF to the Illinois State Board of Education and the Illinois Attorney General’s office, calling for a formal investigation into the school for allowing a “hostile antisemitic environment for Jewish students” to take root. Gertz was among the community members who signed their names to the action.
Mellman said the complaint has yet to receive a response from either governmental body.
At the beginning of this year, OPRF shared plans to foster better cross-community relations, including contracting with Convergence, a consultant group whose primary aim has been fostering nonpartisan cooperation. Mellman and Gertz said they’re not satisfied with the steps OPRF has taken, although Mellman said that he would speak to issues in public more measuredly if elected to the school board.
The pair’s association with these efforts has drawn condemnation from some in the community, chief among them a group called D200 Neighbors for a Fair School Board. The group unsuccessfully filed a challenge to Mellman’s candidacy in December, arguing that Mellman’s move to file the complaint against OPRF would put him in a conflict of interest if elected to the school board.
“We make our objection to Mr. Mellman’s candidacy with considerable reluctance,” The group wrote in a December blog post. “However, in this rare case, we believe that Nathan Mellman is unquestionably unqualified to serve on D200’s school board. Mr.
Mellman has fundamental misunderstandings of the role of school boards and has egregious conflicts of interest. We believe that Mr. Mellman’s serious shortcomings fall within the Cook County Board of Elections guidelines and procedures for removing a candidate from the electoral process. And so, after deep reflection, we feel bound to enforce Cook County’s election guidelines by objecting to Mr. Mellman’s candidacy as our civic obligation.”
Mellman and Gertz were not fazed by the pushback.
“It really hasn’t affected us,” Gertz said. “I think for a lot of people it’s actually had quite the opposite effect.
“We’ll let the loud opposition continue to voice its concerns. I think we’ll just kind of approach the average voter and take it from there. But I hope that the rest of the election is as civil as possible.”
