2 Elmhurst School Board Incumbents Seek Re-Election

ELMHURST, IL — Two incumbents on the Elmhurst School District 205 board are seeking re-election, while another is not.

Monday was the last day to submit petitions to run in the April 6 election. Incumbents Kara Caforio and Jim Collins are running again, but Margaret Harrell is not. Harrell has been on the board since 2013.

The others seeking the three available spots are Gordon Snyder, Leslie Stettin, Marie Gall, Athena Arvanitis, Nicole "Nikki" Slowinski and Laurel Schrementi.

Caforio, the board's president, was elected to the board in 2017. Previously, she was active in the local PTA and was a former teacher in Glendale Heights and Lake Zurich. She had filed last week.

On Monday, Collins filed on the last day of a week-long filing period. He has been on the board for a dozen years. From 2003 to 2018, Collins was the managing director at Wells Fargo Securities. His LinkedIn page now lists himself as capital projects managing director.

Also filing on Monday was Snyder, who ran in 2019. He is the construction operations manager at Elgin-based Hampton, Lenzini and Renwick, according to his LinkedIn page.

The others submitted paperwork last week.

One of the candidates, Stettin, is associated with the "Reopen D205" Facebook page, which has more than 1,300 members and is pushing for in-person learning. She used the page to promote a protest in October outside the district's central office. Stettin's Twitter page describes her as "CEO to The Stettin Family and full time taxi driver to 3 kids who play travel sports."

Marie Gall works at Cicero Public School District 99 and is a former teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, according to her Facebook page.

Arvanitis is the assistant principal for student programs and operations for New Trier High School. The North Shore school serves about 4,000 students on two campuses, about half the enrollment of Elmhurst School District 205, which serves all grades.

New Trier is one of the wealthiest schools in the state. According to the Illinois Report Card website, 3 percent of New Trier's students come from low-income families, compared with 15 percent in Elmhurst.

Schrementi is a senior active learning designer with John Wiley and Sons in Oak Brook, where she has worked since 2014, according to her LinkedIn page. She is a former teacher in Indiana.

Slowinski is the director of leadership development for Advocate Aurora Health, according to her LinkedIn page. She is a former adjunct instructor at Elmhurst College.

In Illinois, school board members are unpaid. During the pandemic, school boards nationwide have found themselves caught in the crossfire between parents calling for in-person education and teachers unions favoring remote lessons.