St. Charles School District holds listening sessions to hear about community’s wants, needs

St. Charles North High School sophomore Nicholas Dawson is concerned about what St. Charles School District 303 is spending money on.

“I feel like we’re throwing money at things that don’t really need to be fixed,” Dawson said following a listening session Thursday that was led by Superintendent Paul Gordon and Chief Communications Officer Scott Harvey, who both recently started with the district. “Another one of my major concerns is websites and applications that are installed into our laptops that really don’t need to be fixed. There are a lot of problems in our district and I can assure you that things like Google Classroom isn’t one of them.”

Thursday’s session at St. Charles East High School was the fourth and last in the first round of listening sessions, which began last month. Another round of listening sessions is set to take place in the winter/spring and a third round will be scheduled in late spring.

The sessions are part of the district’s new community engagement plan – Listen Learn Return.

Gordon and Harvey both started with the district July 1.

“Scott and I, we’re a big two months and I think seven days on the job,” Gordon told participants at the beginning of Thursday’s session. “So why it’s called listen and learn is literally for us to hear the community as well as the board members to hear the community. That’s the real goal here – to help us be informed…all these different perspectives help shape the work that we’re doing.”

Harvey reiterated the district’s desire to hear what people had to say.

“We’re really focused on the listening and the learning,” Harvey said. “Return – which is in the name – is that opportunity for us to come back with the information that we receive, that we learned and the action steps that we will be taking.”

In group discussions, participants talked about the challenges facing the district, the opportunities for growth and what they were most proud of within the district. During the discussions, participants talked about such challenges as overcrowded school buses caused by not having enough bus drivers.

Participants also said the district needs to do a better job of conveying information and addressing any misinformation that is being disseminated in the community.

Other issues discussed were the need for the district to hire more social workers and school psychologists to help students with their mental health needs and focusing more on the positive and less on the negative when it comes to teaching history.

Gordon said he thought the listening sessions have been helpful. About 50 people attended each session.

“Tonight was a great representation of what these listening sessions are really about,” he said after the session. “It’s about community members coming together, telling their stories to each other around big topics, big questions that we posed to them, and then sitting knee to knee and hearing each other. This is something that we need in this country. Not everybody agreed with each other. But everybody was really respectful and kind and thoughtful and I believe, maybe had some different perspectives as they left this meeting tonight.”