For Jim O’Connor, the current District 97 Board of Education member who is hoping to become re-elected on April 7, more equitable student success is as much about an adjustment of expectations as of policy.
“We must not be satisfied until we support all our students to be successful academically, socially and emotionally,” said O’Connor, who is running against nine other candidates for four open D97 board seats.
“Forty percent of our elementary school students are not currently on track to earn a college-ready score of 21 on the ACT. We must not rest until we have a rigorous program that challenges all of our students,” he said.
O’Connor said the district could do a lot better educating its students from low-income households. Currently, he noted, only about half of low-income D97 students perform at grade-level in reading. That’s comparable to 86 percent of students from non-low-income households, he said.
“This 35 percentage-point gap is larger than the average gap statewide, and it’s unacceptable,” he said.
O’Connor, a project director for Advance Illinois, an education policy organization, helped start a high-performing middle school on Chicago’s West Side. He hopes to apply the successes from that experience to his next term.
“One hundred percent of the alumni from our first three graduating classes were accepted into college prep high schools and, together, they accepted more than $4.3 million in scholarships,” according to a statement on his campaign website.
While not satisfied with the current rate of progress the district has made toward eliminating the academic achievement gap, O’Connor did point out that there are some successful policies in place from his previous term that he would build on if given the opportunity to serve another term.
“I like the increased rigor and consistency that our International Baccalaureate (IB) program is bringing to the district,” he said. “We’ve been gathering feedback from parents, staff and students in the form of our 5Essentials survey two years in a row. Last year, we got feedback from over 2,200 people, which helped us improve and so I’d like to invest more in using that data,” he said.
But one signature priority he would like to advance if he’s re-elected is assessing the state of student equity in the district in order to give low-income students better opportunities to access high-level courses.
“I would like to do an audit to look at how our students access higher-quality programs and where the support goes in our district,” he said. “So I wonder, of our upper-level classes, who’s in those classes and how do we make them more diverse? For instance, I’d like it to be plainer to parents on how they can get their kids into upper-level courses.”
CONTACT: michael@oakpark.com
