District 91’s school board hopes to soon take its next step towards finding a new superintendent of schools: the hiring of a search firm to help.
Three potential firms made presentations during a Board of Education meeting on Nov. 13. The three contenders are: School Exec Connect, Education Leadership Solutions and the Illinois Association of School Boards. School Exec Connect and Education Leadership Solutions are for-profit firms, while the Illinois Association of School Boards is a nonprofit organization.
At the same meeting, the board also discussed chronic absenteeism and kindergarten assessment.
The superintendent position became vacant in July when Dr. Elizabeth Alvarez stepped down in order to join Proviso Township High School District 209.
Dr. Robert Hubbird, District 91’s assistant superintendent of finance and operations, is now interim superintendent, as the process to find a permanent replacement continues.
According to board President Shannon Wood, Hubbird will finish out Dr. Alvarez’s contract, which ends on June 30, 2026. Wood said the goal is for a permanent superintendent to begin in July 2026.
“We, the board, now have to come up with what we want out of a superintendent, what our expectations are, and what we’re looking for,” Wood said.
The next step is to hire the search firm to help, which the board hopes to do at its next meeting Dec. 18.
During their presentations, each of the search firms talked about their qualifications, experience, proposed strategy and cost.
Other items on the agenda
At its November meeting, the board also discussed how to decrease chronic absenteeism. This was defined by Hubbird as missing a total of 18 days in a school year, which is about a month.
“Missing a whole month, to put it into perspective, is 135 hours of instruction,” Hubbird said. “That’s what a student misses if they are identified as chronically absent. Just imagine what someone could learn with an extra 135 hours of instruction.”
During the 2022-2023 school year, the district’s percentage of chronic absenteeism reached 25.69%. That percentage dropped to 21.9% during the 2023-2024 school year and continued to decrease to 20.58% for the 2024-2025 school year.
So far this school year, D91’s chronic absenteeism rate is 9.1%, which Hubbird said puts the district on pace to finish the year at about 20%.
Although the chronic absenteeism rate has improved, Hubbird emphasized that there is still substantial room for growth.
“You can see our percentage has been going down for the past couple years but 20% is still way too high,” Hubbird said. “The state average is 25%. We are below that, but we would like to get that number even lower.”
Hubbird noted that data shows a clear trend: students perform better when they are in school consistently.
“This message is for parents,” Hubbird said. “Parents, we cannot teach empty seats. We need your child here each and every day that they’re healthy enough to be in school.”
Another topic that was highlighted during the Nov. 13 meeting was the Kindergarten Individual Development Survey (KIDS). According to the Illinois State Board of Education, the Kindergarten Individual Development Survey is an observational tool designed to help teachers, administrators, families and policymakers better understand the developmental readiness of children entering kindergarten.
Completed within the first 40 days of the school year, the assessment looks at three areas of development: social and emotional, language and literacy and math. The survey is then repeated two more times during the school year.
“Our kindergarten students are outperforming the state in two out of three of those metrics, which is really nice to see,” Hubbird said. “We have a really strong kindergarten program and we want to continue to promote that program.”
Currently, D91 has space for 13 more kindergarten students. For more information, email register@fpsd91.org.
