Principal Dave Johnson at Huntley (Ill.) High School has announced he will retire in June, the school’s student newspaper, The Voice, reported last week. He has served as principal at the high school since the 1995-96 school year.
“Clearly I think the one constant throughout the entire time I’ve been here has been the student growth,” the paper quoted Mr Johnson as saying. “And with that, I’ve gotten to enjoy all of the opportunities and challenges that come with that: everything from building programs to hiring teachers to becoming, quite frankly, what is a large suburban high school from what was a small town high school.”
A human resources officer in District 158 said the timing of the announcement was good for the future of the fast-growing school, as the district will have time both to build a good search committee for Mr Johnson’s replacement and screen any prospects thoroughly.
And by ‘fast-growing,’ we mean FAST!
Current enrollment at the high school, reported on the district’s website, is 2,241. This represents a decrease of about 3 percent from last year’s enrollment of 2,301, reported by the Illinois State Board of Education.
However, the enrollment was 1,460 only five years before that, so the rate of growth is just a little faster than the rate for the town of Huntley: in the half-decade between 2006 and 2011, the high school enrollment grew by 174 percent, whereas the town’s population grew by 324 percent in the decade between the 2000 Census and the 2010 Census.
Since the rate seems to be faster in the last half of the decade than it was in the first half, the numbers may reveal an increasing rate or simply that more teenagers who enrolled at the high school were present in the 2006-2011 cohort. So, we’re comparing, in a way, apples and oranges, because those are the official, cleansed numbers we have available. But whatever the cause, the district’s population is growing fast.
Some history during Mr Johnson’s tenure
Dave Johnson became principal of Huntley High School in 1995, before most of the current students at the high school were born, when school was held in the building now operated by the Huntley Park District. In 1997, he oversaw the move to the school’s current location on Harmony Road. At the time, the campus had an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school.
Substantial construction in 2002 created two wings and added a main office for the high school, special ed classrooms, high school science labs and classrooms, and eighth-grade classrooms. A few health classrooms and a computer lab connected the two western wings and completely surrounded the west gym, used at the time for middle school students.
On the east side, new construction gave the high school a much larger gym, art and music classrooms, the 700-seat performing arts center, a few locker rooms, a weight room, and offices. The performing arts center is state-of-the-art, including an orchestra pit, backstage rooms, and balconies.
Continued rapid growth necessitated the building of two new middle schools for the district in 2005, leaving the high school and Leggee Elementary School alone at the Harmony Road campus.
The district maintains three campuses, but the Harmony Road campus is the only one used for a high school. If the growth continues, that could change well before the 2020 Census.
We wish Mr Johnson well in his retirement and congratulate him, his staff, and the students at Huntley in this, his final year. The school was named as one of 21 Illinois public high school or unit districts on the Advanced Placement Honor Roll, signifying that Huntley simultaneously achieved increases in access to AP courses for a broader number of students and improved the rate at which AP students earned scores of 3 or higher on an AP Exam. What a great final year!
