Bauer highlights transparency in District 214 school board campaign

When COVID-19 was declared a global health issue in March of 2020, schools across the country, including those in District 214 (D214), announced their closure to thousands of panicked and confused citizens. Although this was a national mandate, local school governments imposed their own policies with respect to individual districts’ school closures.

To Mount Prospect resident Elizabeth Bauer, however, something seemed amiss. Unlike other school districts, Bauer says that the D214 school board had issued their local school closure mandate without collecting any public votes or opinions. 

Bauer admits that she had paid little attention to the activities of the school government prior to COVID-19. However, after witnessing what she perceived to be the D214 school board’s lack of open communication with the public at the onset of COVID-19, she strongly felt that changes needed to be made to the school political system so that students and their families could be more informed whenever district policies changed.       

“I’m not some kind of born politician,” Bauer said. “I’m an introvert … but I felt the need to step up and say, ‘No, this is not how the school board should operate.’” 

Bauer is currently running for a position on the D214 school board along with fellow Mount Prospect resident Misa Edwardson, who is running in a separate campaign (Edwardsen was not responsive to KnightMedia interview requests).

Bauer and Edwardsen are both running against Alva Kreutzer, Bill Dussling and Frank Fiarito, candidates with previous school board experience who are all running in a joint campaign. All five candidates, including Bauer, are vying for three available spots.

 Bauer attended Michigan State University for her Associate’s Degree, followed by the University of Notre Dame for a master’s degree in history; she then attended the University of Illinois Chicago for a second master’s degree in Applied Economics. Since college, Bauer has been an actuary, which relies heavily on statistics and data analysis. Her actuarial work has been with the Aon Hewitt insurance company for several years, and she is a 26-year D214 resident with three children who are either currently attending or have attended Rolling Meadows High School.

Bauer’s belief that the school board has consistently made significant decisions with a lack of public approval — specifically in the case of COVID-19 — was one of her main reasons for running.

For example, the school board’s decision to remove all freshman Honors English courses from Elk Grove High School’s curriculum, another issue which other districts’ school boards would typically collect votes on, drew her attention.

According to an anonymous D214 school administrative source, Elk Grove’s honors classes were removed as part of an academic pilot program, which places all freshmen in the same level of English regardless of prior PSAT test scores. Under the program, which is three years in the running, freshmen can still earn honors credit based on their performance in their English class, enabling them to take AP English classes as upperclassmen. The pilot program thus seeks to grant more students access to college-level courses. 

Pilots such as these do not require public votes to be imposed by the school board.

On a district-wide scale, David Schuler, the former superintendent of D214, created and owns Transeo, a website which D214 students now use to log service hours required for graduation. Bauer says that no public votes or surveys were conducted with respect to the launch of Transeo in the district, only cementing her decision to run for school board.

Despite this, Bill Dussling, an incumbent candidate running for re-election and current board president, said that Schuler’s independent executive actions are perfectly legal under his contract. The board even appointed a lawyer to approve the process of launching Transeo.

On the matters of pressing academia-based issues — such as the changes to Elk Grove’s curriculum — and the instatement of new District software —such as Transeo — she finds it imperative that the school board’s policy of public communication be changed first in order to prevent these unknown decisions. 

“When you have openness and responsiveness, you’re positioning the school board in a way that everybody can work together and say, ‘We’re all people of goodwill, let’s solve these problems’ … having transparency and good governance is kind of the prerequisite to solving some of the other issues,” Bauer said.

On the school board, Bauer hopes to give the public a greater influence on the actions of the board. 

“Even if I’m just one out of seven, I’m still able to introduce something to the agenda and … ensure there is a vote taken towards being more accountable on these sorts of issues,” Bauer said.

Prior to COVID-19 and her involvement with the school board, Bauer has filled several volunteer positions within the district and community. She currently coordinates the serving of coffee and donuts at Our Lady of the Wayside Church, which are available to anyone who attends Sunday masses. 

When her youngest child, who is currently a sophomore at Rolling Meadows, was in Cub Scouts, Bauer spearheaded the Cub Scout Committee chair. She was primarily responsible for organizing pack meetings and promoting sales and fundraisers.

Although each of these jobs were very different, Bauer says she mostly took on these roles because no one else seemed available to provide these services to the community.

“It gives you a mindset of, ‘Suck it up and do a thing because it needs to be done,’” Bauer said.

Bauer attributes her decision to run for school board despite her lack of experience to a similar sense of duty.

“I’m not the sort of person that likes to go out there, engage in small talk, wave to people, go to an event, shake everybody’s hand and be recognized and applauded … but I looked at the situation more and more and saw, ‘OK, I feel like I need to do this,’ because if not me, I didn’t see other people stepping up,” Bauer said. 

(I am waiting on the Associate Principal to fact-check whether or not the Elk Grove decision and the COVID decision were purely executive).