The District 202 Board of Education has hired a third-party firm to help conduct an executive search to replace outgoing Superintendent Steve Wilder.
The board approved entering into a contract with the Illinois Association of School Boards to facilitate the search at Monday night’s meeting.
The expectation is to have Wilder’s replacement named as early as March and have them in place by July 1.
The Knoxville school district will pay $7,900 to IASB to conduct the search. IASB charges school districts a sliding scale based on enrollment numbers. The board could agree to pay the firm more if they hire them for additional services related to the executive search.
Terms of the deal include, among other things, posting the vacancy, collecting applications and verifying the qualifications, developing a list of recommended candidates and scheduling interviews.
There could be a stakeholder interview with potential candidates in the near future. At that interview, members of the community, teachers, and non-certified staff would have the opportunity to meet with finalists to question them and determine who they’re choice would be, not unlike what District 205 did in 2017 during their Superintendent search.
In other action from District 202, the board approved the 2019 tax levy of $5,073,749.
Equalized Assessed Value projections for the district came in slightly lower than what previous projections had been. The new EAV is $133,565,290 or a 3.01 percent increase from last year’s property value.
With that EAV and levy, the tax rate for the district would come in around $4.47, which is only a cent higher than previous projects.
“To put it in more realistic terms, the owner of a $100,000 home would pay $1,475. It’s actually down a couple of dollars from last year,” Wilder told board members. “So even though the EAV went down a little bit — a pretty small impact on the levy itself and the tax rate and tax bill.”
For comparisons from previous years, the approved tax rate is still lower than the district’s ten year average of $4.54. And nearly 20 cents lower than the high from 2016 at $4.87.
The school board also approved an anonymous restricted donation of $20,000 to go towards the district’s Esports club.
With that money, not only can the Esports club buy 12 new computers for the team to practice and compete on, but with 12 computers they can host matches and tournaments with other schools.
Ryan Wessling, Knoxville’s Esports coach, told board members that no other school district in the area has the facilities to do that. Wessling also told board members that he’d been speaking with school administrators to find a location to set up an Esports arena, saying they’d identified an office at the high school that could be moved and the space renovated for the club.
Finally, the school board approved the purchase of Raptor security software.
The software and hardware will require any guests coming into the schools to scan photo identification so that a background check can be performed.
As long as the individual isn’t flagged for some reason, a visitor’s badge is printed out that includes the photo of the individual and they’re allowed into the school.
Wilder said that he’d experienced the software first hand and the background check and badge printing was very quick.
