School Board Member Looks Back on Two Decades of Service

As a high school student in southern Illinois, Mark Metzger spent a lot of time participating in speech, debate and drama activities. And, as a student involved in the arts, he would get very frustrated when the school board cut back each year in programs he participated in — even as they spent more in other areas, particularly athletics.

“I thought that was wrong. And I sort of made a quiet promise to myself at that point if I ever had the opportunity to do something about it, I would make sure it didn’t happen again,” Metzger said. “And I never really gave it another thought until the summer of 1991 when Helen Swanson who was on the () board of education at the time decided she was not going to run again.”

Twenty years later, the 46-year-old Aurora resident has retired from the Indian Prairie District 204 Board of Education. During his tenure he served as president for five years, and as secretary for four. He attended his last meeting as an elected official May 2, when the board presented him with proclamation in honor of his service.

“Twenty years seemed like a nice, round number,” Metzger said of his decision to not seek reelection. “It was more than half the existence of the district, which struck me as maybe that’s an indication somebody else needed to do this for a while.”

To say that Metzger has seen a lot of changes in District 204 over the past two decades would be an understatement. When he was first elected, there were less than 8,000 students in the district. Now, there are nearly 30,000. The average school district in Illinois has 1,600 students, he said.

“We had four or five years consecutively where we grew by more than 2,000 students each year. So we grew by more than an average school district in this state year after year after year. It was hard not focus on anything but growth in those years,” said Metzger, who has a law office in downtown .

A group of residents rose to the challenge in “a completely selfless fashion” in the early 1990s, he said. Recognizing the coming wave of residents, they put together the first referenda.

“They did so incredibly selflessly, because they were building buildings that none of their kids were ever going to go to,” Metzger said. “If that had not happened, the Indian Prairie we have today would never have happened, cause at some point no one would ever move into a community where the schools are all hopelessly over crowded. I think that’s the greatest challenge Indian Prairie ever saw, and as a community we addressed that problem head-on and in a rather decisive fashion.”

In the past 20 years, 12 elementary schools were built, along with two high schools, three middle schools and the district’s education center which houses preschool and administration.

As the district dealt with space needs, it also had to make sure it met educational needs.

“The first major curriculum change the board adopted was hands-on science, which is heavily focused on trying to give students immediate direct experiences with whatever was being studied,” Metzger said.

While recent challenges included cutting $25 million from the budget in just under two years as a result of state’s financial crisis, the “most contentious battle” the district faced was anything to do with building Metea Valley High School, Metzger said.

The one vote in the last 20 years Metzger wishes he could change relates to the third high school.

“I would not make that high school boundary decision until the spring before the building opened. That would have avoided all kinds of problems that we went through,” he said. “I voted with the majority in 2005 when we made the decision to break that pattern and to announce in advance of even breaking ground on the building what the boundaries for that school would be.”

Metea was the only school that did use the traditional community process of setting boundaries the spring before the building opened. As a result, there was no oncoming relief in the fall once families settled into their schools.

“Those folks that were disaffected by the decision had to wait more than three years to get relief,” Metzger said. “I think the district paid a huge price for the upset that created in the community, for the anger it created.”

Looking to the future, he said he hopes the district will continue to embrace technology, and relax its rules about students using smartphones and digital music players during the school day. Instead, schools should find a way to incorporate the “communication and computing power in these tools” into students’ work.

"Instead of taking these things away, we need to find a way to use them to our advantage because it doesn’t cost us anything when the kids have got those things already with them,” said Metzger, who gave a keynote speech on the subject last fall at an Illinois Computing Educators conference. “To not have our kids learn to communicate with each other and work with each other in that fashion is to do them, I think, a great disservice. I’m heartened to see both the education community and Indian Prairie are moving in that direction.”

Among the many memories that stand out are the graduations of his sons Douglas and Ryan, in 2007 and 2009, respectively, from . As a board member, he was able to hand them their diplomas. He also gave them hugs, which caught the next student in line off-guard.

‘I could see the kid behind him get these huge eyes and the look on their faces ‘oh my God, we did not practice that!’” he joked.

Nicholas, Metzger and his wife, Judy’s youngest son, is currently in sixth grade at Fischer Middle School.

Although he won’t be sitting at the District 204 board table on Monday nights, Metzger said he will continue to stay involved in the community. He currently serves on the board of Rush Copley Medical Center and will take over the chairmanship In October.

And while it was “a real kick” to hand his sons their diplomas, there is another graduation memory that also stands out.

After the 2001 ceremony and most people had left the gym, he saw student Aaron Moore climb on stage and begin speaking into the turned off microphone. When asked what he was doing, the then junior said he was practicing, because he was going to give the speech next year.

And in 2002, the graduating class did select Moore, who has Down Syndrome, as the student they wanted to speak. In his speech, which Metzger shared during the May 2 board meeting, Moore talked about how his family moved to the area five years earlier because his other high school didn’t want him.

“They didn’t think I could make it. They gave up on me. They tried to send me away to a school far away, away from my friends and neighbors,” Moore said in his speech. “So I came to Neuqua Valley...and you helped me become a part of this school. I want to thank everyone for being helping me, and for being my friends.”

Metzger said the moment stands out as one of the most rewarding in his time as a board member.

“I really think what Aaron says in that speech is fundamentally the lesson of Indian Prairie," Metzger said. "It’s a testament to what it Indian Prairie is and what it’s become.”