As work on the student-based health center continues to progress, Community Consolidated School District 21 will soon start to seek volunteers to fill an advisory board that will be tasked with making recommendations and providing community support and feedback.
Dr. Michael Connolly, superintendent of schools, outlined his recommendations for the board, which would likely include 13 people appointed by him and confirmed by a vote from the Board of Education. These include:
- Two district administrators
- The district’s public health liaison
- The district’s McKinney-Vento liaison
- A certified school nurse
- The nurse practitioner assigned by Advocate Health
- A community member at large
- One parent representative from the Holmes school strand (Frost, Holmes, Twain, Whitman)
- One parent representative from the London school strand (Field, London, Riley, Tarkington)
- One parent representative from the Cooper school strand (Cooper, Kilmer, Longfellow, Poe)
- An at-large parent representative
- A representative from OMNI Youth Services
- A community member with a medical background (a medical doctor or a doctor of osteopathic medicine)
Members will be able to serve “as long as they’re interested and willing to,” according to Dr. Connolly. However, members of the advisory board who are also employees of CCSD21 would be asked to step down as they separate their service from the district so they can be replaced by an active staff member.
Additionally, the parent volunteers would likely forfeit their space on the board as their child leaves the district for high school to “leave a space for a parent who’s currently in the district.”
Over the coming weeks, the district will seek the parent representatives and the community members via a form that will be distributed through the website and ParentSquare, its communication platform. The superintendent would then meet with any candidates before potentially bringing them to the board for approval.
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