District 15 Appoints 7 New Administrators for Upcoming School Year

Seven new District 15 administrators were announced by Superintendent Scott Thompson at the June 13 Board of Education meeting. The principals began their new jobs on July 1.

• Darlene von Behren now serves as assistant superintendent for personnel and human services. Prior to accepting a position with D-15, von Behren served as assistant superintendent for administration and personnel with Plainfield Community Consolidated District 202 since July 2009. In all, she will bring a total of 22 years of experience in leadership roles within school district human resources departments in Illinois, Pennsylvania and British Columbia, Canada.

• Susan Gehring now serves as assistant director for student services. Prior to accepting a position with D-15, Gehring served as the assistant superintendent for student services in Antioch Community Consolidated School District 34. She held that position since 2009. She served as the district’s assistant director of special services for two years before stepping into the position of the director of special services, which she held for seven years. She also served five years as a special education resource teacher in District 34.

• René Carranza, a former assistant principal in D-15, Carranza now serves as ’s principal. Carranza first joined D-15 in 2001 and served as an assistant principal at Winston Campus Junior High for a year, before moving on to serve as Carl Sandburg Junior High School’s associate principal for the next two years. In 2004, he left D-15 to join Community Consolidated School District 62 in Des Plaines, where he served as principal at Plainfield Elementary School through the 2010-11 school year. This past year, he served as principal at District 62’s Orchard Place Elementary School. In all, Carranza has been an educator for 38 years. He began his career in 1978 serving as a kindergarten and first-grade teacher in Los Angeles, and for the next 18 years, held a variety of teaching and counseling positions within a number of school districts in the southern California area. In 1996, he accepted his first principal position in West Costa Unified School District in Richmond, CA, and served there for five years before moving to Illinois to serve as Winston Campus Junior High’s assistant principal.

• Monica Petersen, the assistant principal at for the past four years, now serves as Jane Addams School’s principal. Petersen joined District 15 in 2001 and served for seven years as a third-grade teacher at Gray M. Sandborn Elementary School. Then in 2008, she accepted her past position as assistant principal at Jane Addams.

• Theresa Sofianos now serves as s principal. Sofianos has served for the past year as one of the District’s student services coordinators for special education. Prior to that, she served for nine years with the North Suburban Special Education District as its district services and response to intervention coach. She began her career in education in 1990, serving for 12 years as a second- and third-grade teacher and a resource teacher in Glenview Public School District 34.

• Christopher Martelli has returned to D-15 to serve as John G. Conyers Learning Academy’s new assistant principal. Martelli first joined District 15 in 2001 and served for a year as an assistant principal at Lincoln School before moving to Virginia Lake Elementary School, where he served as assistant principal for two years. For the 2004 school year, Martelli served as the principal at Hunting Ridge Elementary School. In 2005, he left District 15 to join Community Consolidated School District 54 in Schaumburg, where he served as the principal at Frederick Nerge Elementary School in Roselle for five years before moving to Albert Einstein Elementary School in Hanover Park, where he has served as the principal for the past two years.

• Jennifer Seoane now serves as ’s assistant principal. Seoane joined D-15 earlier in the 2011-12 school year, serving as an assistant principal intern at Lincoln Elementary School. Prior to that, she served for almost seven years as a fifth-grade gifted bilingual teacher in District U-46 in Elgin before leaving for several years to raise her family and further pursue her education. She has also served at Purdue University for three years as a teaching assistant and teacher leader, and in Washington’s Tumwater School District for three years as a third- and fourth- grade teacher.