Grundy Reporter

Brian Pohlman, school board candidate for Minooka District 201, said the district has been facing challenges since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pohlman said that since the pandemic, there has been a push against lack of transparency and "getting away from the academic excellence and integrity that we had" and fiscal responsibility.  

"We've had some challenges within this district going back a couple years since COVID had started," Pohlman told Grundy Reporter. "We had really started to see more of a push towards lack of transparency and getting away from the academic excellence and integrity that we had. We're also looking at fiscal responsibility, as well.

"But I think the biggest thing that we we were concerned about is just the parental and student rights, especially with COVID, the community as a whole as they would go to school boards, they really didn't feel that they were being listened to. They didn't feel that their opinions and views were being taken into account and really that they were just pushed off into the corner typically, as we would reach out to administration or even school board members, that we would really just get a kind of a boilerplate template response back." 

The election will take place on April 4. Minooka CCSD 201 has 4,493 students over seven schools. The district headquarters is located in Minooka. The school system employs around 278 teachers. The student-to-teacher ratio is 16-to-1.

According to Pohlman, he is a 41-year-old security engineer. He has three daughters currently in the K-8 district, ages 11, 9 and 6.