LM Nov-Dec 2025

Polyak. .. cont’d. IASA’s 2026 Illinois

IASA: In your application, you wrote that college and career readiness is your bread and butter at Leyden. How so? NP: I think it comes back to what I said about opportunities. We hear people talk about preparing kids for college or career. Our approach is to prepare them for college — and career. We have a whole list of pathways that kids can choose — whether they want to go into education or manufacturing or automotive or technology or nursing. Within them, we’ve embedded job-ready credentials. The school district will pay for them to get the certifications to work in those fields. So if they want to go right from high school into the workforce, they’re prepared with the credentials they need, or they can take those experiences to the college level. We work with local industry partners that we meet with, in many cases either monthly or quarterly, to make sure the credentials are the ones they need their employees to have. Those companies turn around and give our students internships and jobs, especially over spring break and winter break and in the summer. It all comes back to us understanding that we don’t operate in a silo. We’re part of the greater community. We need to partner with the workforce to say, what do you need, and make sure we adapt ourselves to the changing workforce so our kids have every opportunity possible.

those machines, getting them the same credentials they would get on the job floor ahead of time, getting them in internships and summer jobs—there’s a local company here that touts that more than half of their entire employee base came from Leyden. Our kids are powering their own communities in that way so that we’re sustainable. Our culinary students will get their ServSafe credentials so they can work in a restaurant. When they get into the upper-level classes, they’ll get their restaurant management credentials so they can go and run a kitchen at a hotel or a restaurant. Those ideals are embedded throughout the curricular pathways. IASA: In your application, you talked about creating significant changes with the development of a new schedule. Can you take me through what that looks like? NP: Prior to our schedule change, we had a very traditional school day. One of the problems was our cafeterias were so small that we had to run five and some years six lunch periods. We had a really bad pedagogy where kids would take 20 minutes of their academic class, then go eat lunch, and come back and take the second half. We couldn’t fix it because the cafeterias were binding us. So we did a nearly $100 million project to build new cafeterias where we could get down to three lunch hours. But that also allowed us to create a period in the day we call Eagle Time that tries to take this 3,500-student high school experience down to 20 so you can be with a small group of kids and build relationships. Those small advisory groups have a four-year looping advisor—a teacher that’s with that same group of kids two days a week for all four years. They take them from finding and opening their locker to filling out the FAFSA and working on job applications at the end. Within Eagle Time, we’ve also embedded curricular supports we call seminars. If students need help in math or writing or SEL, we have embedded supports in the school day. We have a portion called Freshman on Track, where teachers are making sure kids are getting their work in and passing those freshman classes because we know that’s a huge indicator

IASA: Can you give some examples of job credentials that students at Leyden have?

NP: Leyden has one of the biggest manufacturing corridors in the country with Rosemont, Franklin Park, and Schiller Park. If you know how to work a CNC machine, you can make nearly six figures right out of high school. A lot of those companies will pay for a college engineering degree. Getting our kids work experience on

8 LM Nov–Dec 2025