At last night's Board of Education meeting, the President of the Illinois NAACP, took Dr. Grenita Lathan to task for her handling of African American employees:
"... Long before most of you ever considered running for this board, the NAACP openly and loudly complained about the Districts performance when it came to African American employees in all classifications in the district from janitors to superintendents.
While we continue to be dissatisfied with performance based on a visual review of the districts staff, we are more concerned with what is happening to qualify long term staff that we have been successful in attracting to the District.
This administration has been in office for about a year and we have already lost two very strong very qualified African American females, with even more, as I am told, considering leaving the district and looking for positions outside the city of Peoria. I recognize that we have hired an African American Superintendent and I also recognize that she has recruited staff, African American, from other parts of the country. But history tells us that these are short term jobs. the very next better opportunity that presents itself to our Superintendent, it is very likely that she will leave the city of Peoria, she won’t be sticking her roots in the ground to stay here as long as we want our teachers and administrators to stay here and that is true generally of the people who are hired by top administrators, they too leave when the top administrator leaves as well, so again, we are talking about short term employees, not the kind of people that we are trying to attract to the city of Peoria, who will raise their families in this community and in fact, hopefully, install their families into our school district, because they believe it is a good school district. This trend must stop (clap clap)!
Soon you will receive a FOIA request from me asking to look at the numbers in terms of who you have hired and what the trends show. We are concerned about this problem and we wanted to pass that along in the hopes that you to, will be concerned about it."