New Granite City superintendent switched careers. Now she’ll lead her hometown district
Granite City schools will have a changing of the guard this summer as metro-east educator Stephanie Cann replaces Superintendent Jim Greenwald.
Greenwald is retiring after 30 years with Granite City Community Unit School District 9. He’s been superintendent for seven.
“I have two little grandchildren, and I just want to not have to wake up at 5:15 anymore,” said Greenwald, 67, of Granite City. “I’m not retiring because I’m tired. I’m fortunate to be in good health, and I’m a very energetic person. I’m here morning, noon and night. But it’s time to go.”
Joining District 9 will be like a homecoming for Cann, 55, of rural Edwardsville. She grew up in Granite City before going away to college, pursuing a career with an engineering company then switching to education in the mid-1990s.
Cann has worked as a teacher and principal in Roxana and Bunker Hill. She now supervises student teachers in the Teaching and Learning Department at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
Her new job will begin July 1.
“I love the idea of giving back to the district that gave me so much,” Cann said. “The opportunity was just too good to pass up.”
Twelve applied for job
The Granite City School Board advertised the superintendent’s position for two months, received 12 applications and interviewed seven candidates, according to President Matt Jones.
“We wanted somebody who was passionate about Granite City,” he said. “They didn’t have to have roots here, but they needed to know why they wanted to be here and lead our school district.”
Cann’s leadership experience and education played a role in her selection.
She has a master’s degree in educational administration and a specialist degree in curriculum and instruction from McKendree University in Lebanon and a superintendent’s certificate from SIUE. She’s working on her doctorate at McKendree.
“She also had a vision for what she wanted our district to be in three years and five years and 10 years,” Jones said. “She just had a lot of good ideas.”
Those ideas included restructuring the district office to make it more efficient, improving academic programs and getting parents more involved in the educational process.
“We really did have a lot of good candidates, and they came from all over the country,” Jones said. “And we did it on our own. We’re very proud of that. We know districts that have hired companies and spent thousands of dollars to do this, but we didn’t, and we found a great person for the job.”
The transition is bittersweet for Jones, 29, a planner for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in St. Louis. He got to know “Mr. Greenwald” as Granite City High School principal when he was a student.
Started as P.E. teacher
Greenwald graduated from Granite City High School in 1970 and earned an education degree at SIUE, specializing in physical education, health and driver’s ed. He worked as a substitute teacher in Granite City for three years before landing a full-time teaching position at Emerson Elementary School.
But Greenwald fell victim to widespread layoffs after a year. He worked in business management with Sauget Properties from 1979 to 1994 before reaching out to the school district to check on possible openings.
“I was doing some soul-searching at that time of my life, and I just wanted to get back in education,” he said. “I really wanted to use my degree.”
Greenwald was hired as a P.E. and health teacher and football and basketball coach at Coolidge Junior High School and assistant baseball coach at the high school.
Three years later, he was gradually taking classes for his master’s in educational leadership at SIUE when he was offered the job of assistant principal at Coolidge, on the condition that he get on a fast track and finish the degree in a year. He called the promotion a “lucky break.”
“My career had a lot of hard work involved, but also a lot of good luck,” he said.
Greenwald stayed at Coolidge three more years, then moved to the high school and worked three years as assistant principal, three years as vice principal and athletic director and seven years as principal before replacing Harry Briggs as district superintendent in 2013.
As principal, Greenwald was known for dancing at pep rallies and wearing silly costumes for lip-sync battles during homecoming week.
His wife, Karen, also is retiring after this school year. She’s a Granite City High School business teacher, head of the Creating Entrepreneurial Opportunities Program, girls golf coach, pep club sponsor and yearbook staff adviser.
“”It’s going to be nice to slow it down a little,” Greenwald said.
Educational ‘epiphany’
Cann is a 1982 graduate of Granite City High School South who participated in chorus and history club and served as baseball statistician. Her father, the late Leo Schank, was an accountant at Granite City Steel for more than 40 years, and her mother, the late Colleen Schank, was a community volunteer.
Cann attended Illinois College in Jacksonville for a year before earning a degree in history and anthropology at SIUE.
“I thought I wanted to do museum work, and then I found out you had to have a doctorate and there are a minuscule number of jobs.”
Cann ended up working in the regulatory library of an engineering company and later becoming an environmental regulatory specialist and asbestos-abatement and project manager. But everything changed when she agreed to substitute as a GED teacher for a friend on maternity leave at the former Belleville Area College in the mid-1990s.
“I was hooked,” she said. “It was an epiphany. I thought, ‘Oh my God! Why am I not teaching?’ So I quit my job, much to my husband’s chagrin.”
Cann returned to SIUE and obtained her secondary teaching certificate. She then substituted at Roxana Senior High School and later became a history and English teacher, coach for dance team and Scholar Bowl, department chair and eventually principal after earning her master’s.
Next, Cann worked as principal at Wolf Ridge Elementary School in Bunker Hill, where she was involved in everything from grant-writing to preparing state reports, staff supervision to academic-program development.
“It was a challenging experience, but it was definitely beneficial,” she said. “And it helped me get the skills that you need to be a superintendent.”
Meeting new challenges
After leaving Bunker Hill, Cann worked a year for the Bon Eau Foundation, a Florida-based nonprofit corporation dedicated to social and economic justice, education and the visual and performing arts, before joining the SIUE faculty. Now she’s ready for a new challenge.
About 6,000 students attend eight schools in District 9, which includes Granite City, Mitchell and Pontoon Beach.
Cann’s goals include meeting the needs of a student population that is becoming more diverse, raising community awareness, improving academic and co-op programs and developing more partnerships with local businesses and colleges and universities in the region.
“The educational system as it is now (in the United States) isn’t really addressing the needs of the students we have now,” she said. “We’re teaching them the way we were taught, and it just isn’t as effective as it used to be.”
Cann’s husband, Randy, owns R. Cann Electric, based in Edwardsville. They have two sons, Tyler, 28, a Target store manager in the Chicago area, and Jack, 24, a communications staffer with the Illinois State Senate in Springfield.
Cann doesn’t have much free time for hobbies, but she likes to read.
“I love to travel,” she said. “We just got back from Mexico, and we’re going to France just before I start my job. And I like to cook, so I’m going to take a cooking class while I’m over there.”
This story was originally published February 10, 2020 at 5:05 AM.
