Pete Theis

What is your number one concern heading into the upcoming school year?

The number one concern right now in education is the shortage in certain positions. Our number one goal in the HR department both for this year, as well as continuing into next year, is working with current staff to make sure that we’re providing a positive environment for them, that we’re celebrating their successes, that we’re recognizing staff in an authentic way as far as really making sure we’re keeping morale as high as possible so that our folks don’t look to leave and add to the shortages that we’re facing.

We’re doing things like stay surveys to find out why do they stay, what are things that they really like about the district, and what are areas that we can improve upon. We started that a year ago, and from that stay survey information, we received feedback from staff that drove some of the decisions that we made during this school year in terms of changes moving forward. One of them is revamping our special education department, which will lead to some upcoming hirings.

What is the district doing to promote positive mental health?

From the student perspective, we had feedback we received in the stay survey last spring that caused us to take a closer look at what we were doing in our special ed department. We brought in outside consultants to do what we called an equity review of the district. From that review, we received feedback about doing things differently in special ed, trying to be more inclusive, pushing in for services more than pulling students out. The belief was that this would help us both in their academic growth as well as in their social emotional where they’re with more of their peers on a daily basis.

Students are happier when they’re able to be around more of their friends rather than being in smaller classrooms in a self-contained environment all day every day. We’re also disbanding a program where students from all four elementary buildings would be sent to one building if they were identified as having specific needs in the area of special education. We are sending all the kids back to their home schools. We are attendance center based, so it’s neighborhood schools and they are going to be in the building with the kids in their neighborhood now. Because of that we’re greatly increasing our staff in special ed because we’re basically creating a mini program in each building for what had been housed in one building. We see this as a positive for the students from the stand point both academically as well as social emotionally, and it also then helps our staff social emotional in terms of they’re seeing all the support being put in place. Those staff who feel like they’ve kind of been doing it all on their own, there haven’t been enough supports, they’re feeling better about the plan moving forward and how we’re going to work with students and support our staff as well.  I’m pretty excited about the changes. And again, we’ll look at data periodically to see if this has been good for kids, good for staff and how can we continue to make it better, but we believe this will be a good first step for us. The investment in SEL is needed in so many districts. Social workers, psychologists, speech language path, occupational therapists, physical therapists, pretty much all of those areas are increasing as well in order to support the students better, and differently, than what we have.

I want to build and support staff morale. Besides the stay survey we’ve started this year, having a system for staff to identify a colleague each month who they see or have seen go above and beyond, either with students or with staff. We do a monthly shout out to all the folks who’ve been nominated by a colleague from that group. We then draw one winner who, winner or loser, might depend on their perception of me, but they get to have a lunch with me that we schedule. We tweet out their names, “Libertyville 70 wants to celebrate the following colleagues of the month”, so it gets all out there on social media. We’re also looking to honor our retirees a little bit differently than we have in the past. Putting together some short videos where they get a chance to talk a little bit about their career, why they went into education, those kinds of things. Besides getting feedback, we’re trying to find ways to recognize the good work that they’re doing on a daily basis.

Putting staff morale at the center, ultimately, that’s going to drive down to student morale and that happiness factor. I actually was asked to speak to a club at one of the elementary buildings the other day, and they use the PBIS system of rewards for good behavior in the building. Kids get recognized. And so I was able to talk a little bit about that and then let them know that we were doing something similar for staff. Not exactly the same, the staff don’t get to go pick prizes out, but we are finding ways to recognize them. In the same way that we’re looking to recognize students, the kids thought that was kind of cool.

It just so happened that the week before I met with those kids, I actually had lunch with one of the staff members in that building who had been the lottery winner from the previous month. So the teacher could say, I can vouch for Mr. Theis having lunch with a staff member, because he was just here the other day. The kids enjoyed the correlation between doing something for staff for good things as well as recognizing students for good things. We don’t have it all figured out and it is a work in progress and we still have a lot more work to do. It’s kind of one of those journeys rather than destination type things right now.

Can you speak to what your district is doing to promote the health of student athletes?

Being an elementary district, we don’t have football, we don’t have lacrosse, some of those more collision-based kind of sports. We have a rather limited offering of athletics. However, we do have a concussion safety protocol committee that meets each year that talks about how we handle situations where we think we may have a student who’s concussed, whether it’s from an athletic team situation or whether it’s from a physical education classroom. We have staff who are all trained on AEDs and through a very generous donation from an anonymous community member a year ago, we have Stop The Bleed kits in all of our classrooms. So those are readily available in the athletic area as well.

Besides just in the classrooms, all of our coaches and PE people are CPR and first aid trained as well. We have tried to stay up with what are the best practices in this area for our students and student athletes and I’ve just completed the process to bring on board a Director of Safety and Security as an administrative role in the district starting with the 24/25 school year. We’re doing it in partnership with a neighbor district, so that individual will be split between the two. They’ll be looking at not just tornado and fire drills, active shooter, those kinds of things, but just general safety across the board. This will help to ensure that we’re continuing to stay on top of the latest in best practices in this area now. And hopefully the rollout of PublicSchoolWORKS from the safety and compliance training perspective makes that person and that new role happy.