In September of 1983, the Board of Education established the Outstanding Contribution Award for service to the district. This award recognizes a full-time employee who has demonstrated a sustained and/or significant contribution to the educational program and students of the district. This employee also has significantly gone beyond the normal duties of his/her particular job and has made significant contributions to the community within the District.
This year’s winner has been described as “someone who embodies the spirit of this award through their exceptional contributions to education and their unwavering dedication to the students and community”.
This person’s “passion, creativity, diligence, and dependability have made PCHS a better place for both our students and our staff”. Serving on many different committees and leading several different initiatives, this person has served Pekin High for more than 30 years.
As a classroom teacher, this person also served for many years as a Student-Council Advisor. And as their career progressed, they continued to find ways to impact students while also growing themselves as a professional educator. She is both the inventor and implementer of our well-known Dragon Day. Spending years planning, replanning, and reinventing a day committed to helping our newest Dragons transition to Pekin High. And, when we started Directed Electives as a part of our intervention offerings, this person was tapped to develop the curriculum to be used as a part of this new venture in student intervention.
As most of you have probably pieced together by this time, this year’s Outstanding Contributor is Mrs. Lisa Stolz.
There’s even more to her story. Lisa moved out of the classroom and into the RTI/MTSS Coordinator position. She made student attendance or, lack thereof, a passion of hers as well as anyone who would fight the fight with her. Through her work as the Guided Learning Lab Coordinator, Lisa has spent extra time and efforts coordinating resources and interventions to ensure that students found success, and, in turn, ultimately graduated.
If you know Lisa, you know that she is never short of ideas, and she is always willing to step in and work to implement anything that will create a positive school experience for our Dragons. This year, when faced with Spanish classrooms without a teacher, Lisa stepped up voluntarily taking on another role to serve our students even when she knew it would not be easy to take on a prep she had never had before.
Outside of District 303, Lisa is an active member of the Pekin community. She volunteers with our very own Booster Club and faithfully served on the St. Joseph School Board for several years.
But perhaps her proudest accomplishment in addition to being a wife to Jeff is being a mother to her son, Brady, and her daughter, Kaitlyn who is a 2025 graduate of PCHS. Please join me again in congratulating the 2025 Pekin Community High School Outstanding Contributor, Mrs. Lisa Stolz.