Message from the Board of Education

June 21, 2022

Message from theBoard of EducationJune 21, 2022

Superintendent Contract

The Glen Ellyn School District 41 Board of Education is pleased to announce that the Board voted unanimously on a new contract that extends Superintendent Dr. Melissa Kaczkowski one year beyond her current contract. We are grateful for her willingness to continue to serve District 41. After the 2023/24 school year, Dr. Kaczkowski plans to retire after an over 30-year career in education. Her last day in the district will be June 30, 2024.


Dr. Kaczkowski was appointed superintendent of District 41 in July of 2019. Prior to that, she served as superintendent for Roselle School District 12. During her first year in District 41, she began engaging the district through her personalized entry plan and had started a collaborative strategic planning process. Unfortunately, this work was paused when the district was shut down due to the pandemic after only 8 months of her being in the district. Nonetheless, Dr. Kaczkowski worked diligently with the Board and a Pandemic Response Advisory Team to astutely fashion a safe plan for reopening schools in 2021. She has provided exceptional leadership throughout this challenging time in District 41, and we know she will do the same moving forward through the end of her contract.


We applaud Dr. Kaczkowski for being a thoughtful and forward-thinking leader. Under her leadership during the pandemic, District 41 was one of the first districts to offer Covid-19 testing, created, and implemented three different learning models, and brought students back in person as soon as possible. During two plus years of uncommon schooling, Dr. Kaczkowski invested in the required skilled staff to provide teaching, coaching, counseling, and medical services to students. While navigating severe space utilization restrictions her educational strategy sustained the District's status for high academic achievement and protected students against systemic learning loss. Under her guidance D41 was accepted into the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) Learning 2025 Initiative and recognized as an exceptional school district. She has also most recently worked collaboratively with our teacher union to negotiate a new 4-year contract. Every step of the way, Dr. Kaczkowski kept students at the heart of all decisions during an exceptionally difficult time in education and in the world.


Now that District 41 has returned to a sense of normalcy, Dr. Kaczkowski has continued to work collaboratively with the Board to create a community-driven plan for the future. The strategic plan work resumed and a blueprint for the next five years has been created and approved by the Board. We thank Dr. Kaczkowski for her leadership during this process. In addition, she is currently leading a community engagement process to develop plans for addressing space challenges in our district. We are in Phase 3 of a four-phase community engagement process and Dr. Kaczkowski’s consistent leadership is essential. If the community tells us that it wants to continue having low class sizes and/or would like to add full-day kindergarten to our school district, for example, we are confident that Dr. Kaczkowski will see that the process advances forward.


Dr. Kaczkowski is a strong, values-based leader who makes intentional, research-based recommendations to the Board and we are confident in her ability to take the district beyond the pandemic and into the future. We look forward to her continued leadership and success in District 41.


Dr. Robert Bruno

President

Board of Education

Glen Ellyn School District 41