Two Incumbents Voted Off District 300 School Board

One newcomer and a former school board member will join the Consolidated Unit School District 300 school board while two incumbents were voted off the board Tuesday night.

Steve Fiorentino will be the new face on the board. Former board member Susan Kopacz, who decided against running for re-election in 2007, will also join the board. Incumbents Chris Stanton and Joe Stevens, the current board president, will fill the two remaining seats.

Fiorentino said Tuesday night that he worked hard to earn his seat and thought that moving forward the school board had to work together to "earn the trust back from our community."

"We are going to continue to vote and do very important things with negotiations and all these things that we read about, but at the end of the day the community needs to trust the board members," said Fiorentino, while spending the evening with family and friends at an election party at his Algonquin home.

Monica Clark, who had served one term on the District 300 school board, garnered the least amount of votes and was not reelected to her seat.

Clark recently issued an apology in a District 300 press release after she swore during a heated school board meeting. During that meeting, school board members voted 4-3 to release 363 teachers.

Karen Plaza, who was appointed to the board in 2010, also lost her seat Tuesday night.

During the vote to release the teachers, Plaza, Stevens and Clark all voted in favor of releasing the teachers while Stanton voted against releasing the teachers.

The results are as follows for the school board race: Stanton, 3,539; Kopacz, 3,393 votes; Stevens, 3,343; Fiorentino, 3,332; Plaza, 2,702; and Clark, 1,983.