By Philippe Melin
This week, Lake Forest School District 67 announced that Cherokee Elementary School’s principal, Dr. Kate Cavanaugh, has left for another position in Libertyville.
While many parents and community members—particularly those of us in Parents Care—have been vocal in our concerns about Cherokee’s leadership under her tenure, we must also recognize that simply replacing the principal will not, on its own, fix the deeply rooted issues at Cherokee.
The district must take a systems thinking approach to address Cherokee's struggles truly.
Systems thinking recognizes that organizations are complex, interconnected structures where failures rarely stem from a single individual. Instead, they emerge from a web of policies, cultural norms, leadership structures, and operational practices. Replacing one person without addressing the system that allowed failure to persist is like swapping out the driver of a malfunctioning car and expecting the ride to be smoother.
At its core, Cherokee’s failure has been one of losing sight of its primary mission: educating students. Under Cavanaugh’s leadership, the school prioritized a radical vision of inclusion over effective education. With a background in social work rather than traditional education, she implemented a version of inclusion that extended not just to ensuring all students felt welcome—but to permitting chronically disruptive students to remain in classrooms with no meaningful consequences for their behavior.
This breakdown in discipline has been one of Cherokee’s defining problems.
Teachers were left powerless to enforce order, students who wanted to learn were repeatedly subjected to disruptions, and morale among faculty and staff plummeted.
Dr. Cavanaugh's vision of inclusion also failed the disruptive students themselves, as they were not provided the structure and accountability necessary for their development. Cherokee, rather than being a place of academic growth, became an experiment in radical inclusion that ultimately benefited no one.
The Results Speak for Themselves
Cherokee lags behind sister schools Everett and Sheridan in academic performance, and reports from inside the school describe a chaotic learning environment where leadership refused to take control. These issues did not originate with one principal alone, and they will not be solved by simply hiring her replacement.
If the district truly wants to improve Cherokee, it must first publicly evaluate why Cherokee has struggled under multiple principals. Are there systemic policy failures that prevent effective classroom management? Have district-wide leadership and governance decisions contributed to Cherokee’s underperformance? Has the district lost sight of the fact that a school’s core purpose is to provide a quality education above all else?
Cherokee Needs More than a Principal Fix
District 67 must resist the urge to treat leadership turnover as a quick fix. Instead, it should engage in a transparent and honest assessment of what has gone wrong at Cherokee. That means involving teachers, parents, and even students in a meaningful dialogue about what’s broken and what needs to change. It means being willing to acknowledge that district-wide policies—not just individual leadership decisions—may be contributing to Cherokee’s struggles.
Until the district adopts a systems-thinking mindset, any new principal will simply inherit the same dysfunction, and the cycle of failure will continue. The community deserves better than a band-aid solution. We deserve real accountability, structural reform, and a commitment to learning from past mistakes.
The district is at a crossroads: it can either continue its pattern of deflecting responsibility and hoping a new leader will fix everything, or it can take a serious look at why Cherokee has struggled for so long. Parents Care is calling for the latter. Will District 67 finally be willing to engage in the difficult but necessary work of systemic self-reflection?
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