Podcast e-Newsletter                   
Home

District 150 Officials Stress Accountability

Submitted by Alex Rusciano on Mon, 08/30/2010 - 3:35pm
D150.jpg

Teachers and staff from Peoria School District 150 met at the Civic Center today for a kind of ‘pep-rally’ event before the start of the school year.  Superintendent Granita Lathan shared double-digit percentage point increases last year in reading for several schools including Glen Oak and Sterling and reading and math at Manual High School.  She says teachers are responsible for creating a positive learning environment for students to achieve:

LATHAN: Don’t try to fix the students. Fix ourselves first. The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior. When our students fail, we as teachers too have failed.
 
Lathan also says principals need to work with teachers and staff to enforce school code and help improve overall student test scores. Peoria Federation of Teachers union president Bob Darling says he supports Lathan and her new administration. He also says they need to be held accountable in the coming years:
 
DARLING: She has to show us things are going to change. I think when she got her job she said I’m going to make changes and you better understand that. And if she doesn’t make changes then she should be gone.
 
District 150 is grappling with a seven-point-seven-million dollar budget deficit according to early financial numbers. About 600 students from the now-closed Woodruff High School will start classes at Peoria High this week with a new security system and new classrooms. More than 13-thousand students in the district head back to school Tuesday.