Pelleg Graupe: District 102 School Board Candidate

Name: Pelleg Graupe 

Age: 40

Family: Married for 16 years. I have three children. One is at Meridian Middle School, one attends Tripp Elementary School, and our youngest will be entering kindergarten in the fall.

Education: BA, Biology from Cornell University; MBA with Honors from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Occupation: I am a CPA, currently working as a Director of Financial Reporting

Previous Elected or Appointed Offices: I have been an Aptakisic-Tripp D102 School Board Member since 2009 and the board secretary since 2011. I serve on the school board’s personnel and policy committees.

Other community involvement: I am involved with the National School Board Association Federal Relations Network. This winter, I began volunteering as a Chicago Gifted Community Center Hacker Scouts group co-leader.

Position sought: Aptakisic-Tripp District 102 School Board Member (4-year term)

Campaign E-mail address: D102@graupe.us

Campaign committee: none

Campaign Website: none

Campaign Facebook: Graupe for D102 School Board Campaign

Campaign Twitter: none 

Why are you running?

I am asking to be re-elected because I want to make sure that the district, its administrators and its teachers continue to focus on helping our children learn. There are important discussions pending regarding many issues, including education reform, the common core curriculum, education funding and pensions, to list a few. With all this under debate, I want to make sure that our district is focused first and foremost on teaching our children, challenging our children and getting them excited about learning. 

In what ways would the school district benefit from your service?

I am a strong supporter of quality public education. The community, teachers and administrators will continue to see that I champion their efforts to bring the highest quality education to our children. In the four years since I was elected, I have worked on the district’s policy and personnel committees. I was involved in our community-wide future planning process. I have met with members of the Illinois congressional delegation to discuss education policy at the federal level. I am committed to continue the district’s tradition of excellence. 

What is the biggest challenge the school district faces and what should be done to address it?

I think that the biggest challenge to our school district and to those across Illinois is education funding. Federal funding will be affected by sequestration. The state is planning on cutting state funding. Teachers’ pensions will also likely be impacted by new legislation. In addition to this, local taxpayers are feeling the pain of our sluggish economy. Despite this, our district has been able to successfully navigate the current economic situation. In fact, the district received a Standard & Poor’s AAA rating. I have worked to control our costs by supporting sustainable contracts for our future. I continue to support district budgets that eliminate unnecessary costs. I hold our administrators responsible for sticking to these budgets; in fact, they typically come in below budget. As a district, we have been able to do all of this while maintaining great schools for our children. I certainly feel proud that our district and its administration have been able to successfully navigate this storm, but without a commitment to fund education across the state, the quality of education for children across the state will suffer. We need to recommit ourselves to education and remind ourselves the value of a high-quality public education system. 

What do you think the district does well? 

While my goal for the district is to always do better, students leaving District 102 are performing exceptionally as they enter Stevenson High School. Academically, our students are placing, in large numbers, in standard, advanced and honors classes at the high school. More importantly, at whichever level students place, they are finding success at the next level. Furthermore, the district’s emphasis on social-emotional learning is preparing our children to handle issues that are not learned in a typical textbook. 

What should be some of the school district’s priorities over the next four years?

Nearly two years ago we asked our stakeholders (students, teachers, administrators, parents and members of the community-at-large) to give us input into what they wanted to see in our district. Together we developed a long-range plan focusing on four areas: Life and Learning, Personalization and Academic Rigor, Communications, and Human Capital. This year, improvements in the Life and Learning category have included, among other things, a personal technology initiative and the transformation of the media centers at two of our schools. We also continue to integrate critical thinking, complex-problem solving, creativity, collaboration and communication into our education process. Under the Personalization and Academic Rigor umbrella, we are realigning our mathematics curriculum to the common core standards (we did this for language arts last year). We are also implementing a new gifted and talented education model to address the needs of our student body. For Communications, we are continuing to increase the writing opportunities for our students, and we are working to improve and increase the communication between our staff and the community. Finally, under the Human Capital heading, we are working to improve our teacher evaluation model. We are also improving our principal evaluation tool, including adding a student-achievement component. I am excited to continue along this path and to reengage the community as we set new long-term goals. I am also excited to set the priorities for our administration as we move forward to improve our district. We just recently entered into a 3-year agreement with our teachers, so over the next four years, we will need to repeat this process. Our superintendent’s contract will also run its course during that period. We will be required to include a student-growth component in our teacher evaluations. All of these critical issues will be handled in the coming four years. While I am excited about where we are heading, I believe setting the course over these years is of critical importance to the district and to our community.  

What else would you like voters to know?

My goal is not that we are 1 point higher than a neighboring district on an ISAT test, but that we continue to educate and challenge our children. I believe that we can do better with our STEM subjects (science, technology,engineering and math). These areas will continue to be high priorities for our students. We will need to balance this with continued quality programs in language arts and social studies. We should continue to offer foreign languages (and gauge whether the community is interested in expanding our offerings). Additionally, we should not neglect programs that are often cut from schools across the state, such as music and art. We need to make sure that our children are educated with respect to their health and fitness as well. We need to improve our strong social emotional curriculum. I am proud of the programs we offer today in each of these areas, but I am not complacent; I believe that these and other programs can be improved.