Local: Name of school board candidate has a familar ring
Laura Petelle, an attorney and a member of Illinois Central College faculty, will run for the Peoria School District 150 Board of Education. She is running for the 3rd District seat being vacated by Mary Spangler.
Regular readers of this blog might know her better as “Eyebrows McGee,” the name she uses on her blog.
My two cents: I’ve known Petelle for several years. She’s smart and funny. She’s very well educated and a one of those people who is always busy, yet who always tends to get things done.
She has a lot of common sense and will demand accountability from the district, as these blog posts indicate. And she has a background in journalism from her experience as a student newspaper editor at the University of Notre Dame. She’s not going to be making deals behind closed doors and she’s going to do a much better job communicating WITH constituents, a task that includes listening.
According to information, she’s going to be meeting with members of the parents group that fought off District 150’s efforts to shorten the school day for grade school students. That meeting will start at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Godfather’s Pizza located in the shopping center at Glen and Sheridan.
November 23rd, 2008 at 2:27 am
She’s very liberal too.
November 23rd, 2008 at 2:31 am
Liberal, shmiberal.
She’s running for a local school board seat, not Congress.
She’s on the right side of virtually every controversy to hit this board since I’ve started blogging.
November 23rd, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Go Laura!
November 24th, 2008 at 5:49 am
Post needs a district map. Where is the 3rd school board district?
November 24th, 2008 at 6:55 am
The district map in my posession is huge. I need to find someone who can scan it and turn it into a digital file and then we’ll post it here. We just talked about that last night.
November 24th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
I’m not a D150 resident, thank God, so I am just posing this to see what the response is…
Correct me if I am wrong, but Laura doesn’t have any children (which isn’t an issue at all), so she obviously has no children in the district then. Most school districts I have lived in have boards populated by the parents of students. I don’t particularly follow the makeup of the D150 board but is it common for members to not have children in the district? I know that was an issue for Akeson last time around, I believe she had children in private school which is a different situation too.
Just wondered what everyone’s thoughts were on that. Like I said, I don’t have a vested interest since I don’t live in the district. I do have to say I have found Laura’s posts to be very knowledgeable and would likely be a very good candidate even if I don’t agree with her all the time on the blogs.
November 24th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
11bravo — Schock didn’t have any children, either. And he became board president.
Akeson’s children are grown, but they did attend D150 schools.