A combination of decreased student enrollment and retiring teachers prompted the LT administrative team to hire nine new faculty members. Among the new hires is Shanna Lewis, the new Assistant Principal for just over 1,000 students- LT’s Class of 2018.

“LT has a very good reputation as far as the services and support and opportunities that they have for students,” Lewis said. “I know the community is very supportive, and I think that you’re only going to be successful when you have the support of the community. I’ve always heard great things about the kids here.”

Prior to coming to LT, Lewis worked at Lincoln Junior High School in Naperville, where she spent the last four years as an assistant principal. Prior to her time as an assistant principal, Lewis spent 12 additional years working as an educator.

“I liked the complexity of the challenges relating to size, trying to support all students,” Lewis said. “The bigger you get, the more difficult it is. That intrigued me to try to look at ways to do things to support kids in that capacity.”

In addition to Lewis, eight other teachers joined LT’s faculty, LT’s Director of Human Resources, Ed Piotrowski, said. They will work in the Special Education, Family and Consumer Sciences, Mathematics, Language Arts and World Language departments.

“We’ve hired as few as seven teachers some years, and one year we hired 24,” Piotrowski said. “It depends on how many retires we have and student enrollment. This year, we had a slight decrease in student enrollment, so we weren’t hiring as many teachers.”

LT employs about 280 teachers between the two campuses, Piotrowski said.

“First and foremost, [we look for] someone who is student-centered,” Piotrowski said. “We want someone who is able to self-evaluate. We want them to ask questions like, ‘Are the students learning?’ ‘How do I redirect my teaching style?'”

In order to find qualified applicants, the LT administrative team posts information about the job opening to a job board online where it stays for about a month, Piotrowski said.

“We leave it up for about a month so that we don’t miss any qualified applicants who might’ve missed it if we’d only had it up for a week or so,” Piotrowski said.

After the information goes up, division chairs start screening applications. They pick eight to 10 applicants to interview on the division level. From those candidates, two to three finalists are selected to interview with an administrative team that includes Piotrowski and Principal Dr. Brian Waterman.

“[Good teachers] are everything to the learning process,” Waterman said. “It’s cliché that the most important thing in a classroom is the student, but the teacher creates the environment that is centered around the student.”