PCHS Superintendent Jon Green: No Regrets
</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[A 37-year-old career educator's legacy will be a new Pinckneyville Community High School, mixed reviews on whether laptops and access to social networking is a good thing, and administrative entrapment with respect to a staff member being allowed to stay on the payroll.
In between, Jon Green did his job very well, and he leaves the Pinckneyville Community High School after an eight-year run as superintendent to become superintendent of the Millstadt Elementary School.
His children, ages 4 and 8, will go to school there and his wife will shorten her drive to work in the New Athens school district from 45 minutes to 15 minutes.
The Pinckneyville Community High School Board of Education has called a special meeting for 7 p.m. tonight in Room 48 of Thomas Gymnasium.
Much of the meeting will be in executive session, expected to focus on finding a replacement.
The Du Quoin Board of Education also meets this week in special session at 5 p.m. on Thursday and in regular session at 6:30 p.m. to consider filling the vacancy left by the resignation of DHS principal Tammy Beckham.
The Greens' two children will attend the Millstadt elementary school, a district of approximately 950 students and 45 teachers.
"The school feeds into the Belleville West High School."
"It's a tremendous elementary district," he said. "I've never been in an elementary district," he said. "This will be a move for my family," he said. "I'd never thought about going anywhere else. This has been a great eight-year run," he said of the Pinckneyville school system.
"When I got into interviewing at Millstadt it WAS what I thought it was," he said.
"It (Pinckneyville) was one of the most rewarding decisions of my career," he said.
Pinckneyville has a great tradition of education and Green was part of that, authoring the dream and the capital development applications for the new $20 million-plus Pinckneyville Community High School. He felt the new school was the right decision and stayed the course through the entire process.
"There are no major decisions that haven't already been made," he said of construction of the new school.
The school is approximately two months away from completion.
With respect to school politics, Green would only say, "Yeah I would honestly say school politics causes you to think about possibilities outside. I've never looked anywhere else. "I am going to miss this place dearly," he said. "I have made a lot of tough decisions here," he said and went no further on the subject of school politics.
"My last day is June 30, but we have a house to sell here so I am not leaving any time soon," he said.
Maybe the political issues are smaller than Green imagines and this shouldn't be happening.
There are only three that come to mind: Green always felt the community, the teachers, the staff and the parents deserved a state-of-the art new high school. This is a town steeped in great athletic, music and academic tradition and to continue to exist in a Great Depression era building is unconscionable.
Transitioning to electronic classrooms and libraries is the future of education, but it comes at a price--care of pricey laptops and dealing with the use of them for social networking versus purely academic purposes.
Then, there was the board's decision to terminate employee Nolan Kellerman who was involved in a Thanksgiving holiday accident that many close to him would like to have kept quiet, but couldn't.
The problem is that it was Kellerman who embarrassed his family and friends and the school district. Green had nothing to do with it, but felt the board needed to know the law with respect to the rules on hiring and firing personnel. The law came down on Kellerman's side and the board reversed its decision.
And, there were probably odds and ends dealing with construction of a new building and transitioning to it, but nothing that would or should change the course of a great career.
But, it has.