Three candidates have been endorsed for election to the District 233 school board by the Homewood-Flossmoor Education Organization, the teachers/staff union at Homewood-Flossmoor High School.
Camille O’Quin, Temekia Smith and Ariana Leonard won the endorsements. The HFEO is calling their work “Educators for Educators” on behalf of these three candidates, each of whom is teaching or has been a teacher.
Voters will select three new board members in the April 1 election.
Dana Noble, president of HFEO, said the union organized a committee of H-F residents from among the H-F staff. The committee interviewed each of the candidates before announcing the endorsements. In a statement the union said, “H-F teachers believe that the best board decisions will be made for students and teachers by board members who have experience working in classrooms with students.”
O’Quin, a speech pathologist, has worked in schools for years and is now a professor at Governors State University. Smith was an ultrasound technician before she started teaching those skills. She later moved into school administration and today is dean of business and social sciences at Waubonsee Community College. Leonard was a teacher before she became the director of language acquisition at District 206.
The other candidates are Lenita Gipson who’s been working in the pharmaceuticals, medical devices and diagnostics areas for more than 25 years, and Aredell “AJ” Rountree who has worked in marketing the past 15 years.
“Camille, Temekia and Ariana will be great at ensuring that school spending will have a positive impact on students, teachers and the community,” the HFEO said in a statement provided to the Chronicle. “Because they spend their time in a classroom, we are confident that Camille, Temekia and Ariana will recognize the difference between initiatives that sound great and those that will actually advance student learning.”
The statement noted that “teaching has dramatically changed over the last decade between COVID, social media and now AI (artificial intelligence). We are excited to have board candidates who understand how those factors have changed today’s classroom.”
H-F teachers “believe that educators like Camille, Temekia and Ariana will be the best advocates for maintaining the standards and programs to ensure that H-F continues to be a destination school within a dynamic community,” the statement said.
