Reacting to a frustrated school board, pointed criticism from a member of the Oak Park and River Forest High School Community Finance Committee and mounting anger from equity advocates, OPRF Supt. Greg Johnson has switched course and will bring a recommendation to the school board by mid-July to hire additional tutors or academic support staff at OPRF for the upcoming school year.
The school board will vote on the recommendation at a newly scheduled July 16 special meeting. The school board was not originally scheduled to meet in July.
Johnson made the announcement at the beginning of last week’s June 25 school board meeting. At the May 28 school board meeting Assistant Superintendent for Student Learning Jen Hester made a presentation that did not include increased tutoring and a new instructional coaching program until the 2027-28 school year. That timeline did not please some school board members, finance committee member Michelle Mangan and equity advocates who all have been pushing for more high impact tutoring and instructional supports sooner rather than later to combat the longstanding and wide gap in test scores and academic performance between Black and white students at OPRF.
In a telephone interview the morning after the June 25 school board Johnson said the details of the proposal he will bring to the school board are still being developed and he could not yet say how many people the administration will be looking to hire.
Johnson said tutoring is a catch all phrase and can look like a variety of different things and take a variety of different shapes.
He said what will be proposed in July will likely not be the entire instructional support changes the school implements over the next few years as they try to figure out how to incorporate more tutoring and instructional supports into the school day.
“I do not anticipate what we do in July will be the whole thing,” Johnson said. “We’re going to have work throughout next year to figure out broader, systemic issues for tutoring and that would involve reexamination and rethinking through how the master schedule functions and we cannot get a reexamine of how the master schedule functions at the drop of a hat. That’s going to take a little bit more work.”
A number of school board members were frustrated that the May presentation did not include any immediate extra staffing for tutoring or academic support.
“Several board members requested that the administration clarify their plans in this area for the upcoming school year, and the discussion will be held at the July 16 board meeting,” said Audrey Williams-Lee, school board president, in an email.
Johnson’s announcement came before the public comment portion of the school board meeting. Four equity advocates, Burcy Hines, Mary Bird, John Duffy and Chris Thomas, came to the school board meeting prepared to make public comments criticizing the administration and the school board for the failure to boost tutoring and instructional supports. They had to quickly adjust their comments.
“I came to this meeting very angry,” said Duffy, who along with Hines and Bird helped found the Committee for Equity and Excellence in Education, (CEEE) in 2011. “I’ve tempered that but I still need to see the evidence. Trust but verify, right. It’s an old expression.”
Then Duffy launched into the comments he had intended to make. He called for Johnson and the school board to live up to their rhetoric on equity and criticized the lack of action.
“For four years we’ve brought evidence that students needed things you weren’t giving them,” Duffy said.
Duffy said there needs to be a balance of spending at OPRF between equity focused spending and spending on bricks and mortar.
Duffy challenged the school board and Johnson.
“We know you believe in it; you’ve got to just do it,” Duffy said.
Chris Thomas, the co-chair of the Alliance for Black Youth, also called for putting equity orientated academic support as at least as high a priority, or higher, than physical improvements to the OPRF campus.
“Our greatest investment should always be in student learning,” Thomas said. “If we can move with urgency on buildings we should move with urgency on closing the achievement gap.”
Johnson told Wednesday Journal the decision to change the timeline and hire some additional tutoring and academic support workers this year was not driven by school board members unhappy that Hester’s report did not include any recommendations for additional tutoring in the 2026-27 school year.
“No, this is all driven by what we understand and is right for kids,” Johnson said. “That’s what we’re focused on here. That’s what’s driving us completely.”