George McKenna anticipates a smooth transition as he assumes leadership of the Peoria County Regional Office of Education.
“I think the institutional knowledge that you get having worked in an organization is so incredibly important,” said McKenna, who begins his tenure as regional superintendent on June 1.
The promotion comes after spending nearly a decade as assistant superintendent under the leadership of the retiring Beth Crider.
“She’s been incredible for me to learn from. She has great connections, and so those connections now get to be my connections," said McKenna. "I think knowing our personnel, having an understanding of our programming and understanding how all that works is a huge advantage for me.”
McKenna, 51, continues a career in education that spans three decades in various roles, both administrative and instructional, ranging from principal, dean of students and varsity football coach to teaching special education, physical education and driver's education.
“I’ve enjoyed everything that I ever did, in particular drivers’ ed. I think a lot of people get nervous driver's ed, but it was the absolute best subject to teach,” said McKenna. “Kids want to be there, they want to get their license, and it’s a lifelong skill, something they’ll use every day.”
Crider’s tenure as superintendent started in 2014, and McKenna said together they brought “complimentary skill sets” to the office. He said he learned a great deal working alongside her, admiring her passion for kids in the classroom.
“She wants to see everyone be successful, and she that is something that she is known for — her energy,” said McKenna. “She has an incredible level of compassion, and I think as a leader that can be lost.
“So I got this tutorial every day on being a passionate and compassionate leader, and how we treat people and how we advocate for things.”
McKenna thinks the office will need to be more strategic and flexible as it faces likely funding cuts from the federal government, with the Trump administration taking steps to roll back diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI] initiatives and possibly eliminating the U.S. Department of Education.
“We aren’t changing any of our programs around diversity, equity, inclusion,” he said, noting his office primarily serves as the intermediate agency between the Illinois State Board of Education and 18 local school districts across Peoria County.
“It’s really important, I think, for people to know and understand that our organization, the ROE, we don’t go in with a platform to tell districts what to do — we’re a service organization. So, they have an elected school board, a locally- elected school board, and our job is to work with them to what and meet their needs.”
McKenna said despite the increasing financial concerns, the ROE worked through “some really difficult conversations” before deciding against any staff reductions.
“Ultimately, we landed on, ‘We’re going to keep our people here.’ They are the most important part of our organization, and so let’s give them some stability,” he said. “So for us, it’s about being flexible with funding that we have, and we may cut back on some of the other things that maybe don’t have a direct connect to kids and to teachers.”
3 areas of emphasis
McKenna identifies three top areas of emphasis for his office, beginning with a focus on getting kids to the classrooms.
“I think there’s still a layover, a little bit of a lag from the COVID years, and kids haven’t necessarily come back to everyday attendance,” he said. “So our number one priority is that we’re going to really work on our chronic truancy and chronic absenteeism problem.”
McKenna said the office already has teams in programs in place that have been “highly successful” at addressing truancy and excessive absences noting they are not quite the same thing.
“Chronic truancy are essentially the unexcused absences, where maybe you don’t know where a kid is. Chronic absenteeism are kids that miss a lot of school, but you know what they’re doing,” he said. “They’re going on vacations, or they might have long-term medical issue, or they might have something going on where they’re just not coming to school, and then they’re not receiving educational services.”
McKenna’s second top goal focuses on providing quality education at every school in the region.
“We want to make sure when kids are there, that they’ve got the absolute best instructional practices and the best teachers in front of them,” he said. “Our professional learning team is incredible, really talented, and we’re going to continue to work with teachers and principals to make sure that they have just great teachers every day in the classroom.”
The third priority is placing an emphasis on school safety and security.
“We want every kid and every adult when they’re in school during the day to feel safe. That’s not only physical safety, from free from targeted violence, but we’re also talking about social, emotional safety,” said McKenna, who is a Certified Security Assessment Specialist and a member of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals.
He said the foundation of safety and security begins with identifying and addressing problematic behavior.
“How do you manage kids that are presenting some sort of threatening behavior? It could be an actual threat, it could be a change in behavior. It could be any number of other signs that there’s just something not right going on. So, what does that process look like? We spend quite a bit of time and effort on that,” said McKenna.
He said other aspects of security and safety include making sure facilities are built up and protected, and developing emergency response protocols such as evacuations for a fire or a tornado.
“We work very closely with Regional Office of Education 53, which is Tazewell, Woodford and Mason County,” he said. “They’ve been good partners because we know sometimes if we have a major incident, that that some Peoria County schools might be closer to a Tazewell County school.
"So we have developed a partnership there, where we have mutual aid agreements and if a school happens to have a crisis, then we have agreements in place to lend aid to that school.”
