Illini Bluffs - Community Leadership and its Impact on Local Education: An Interview with Norma Lansing

Educators tell me all the time that it takes a village to successfully build a robust, energized school community with positive outcomes. And that’s not something that happens automatically. The state can’t do it. The school board can’t do it. The best faculty in the world can’t do it. And it cannot be administered into submission. It takes everyone. Parents, students, teachers, civic leaders, community volunteers, the business community, alumni, and a kind of cohesion of purpose that is difficult to conjure. But every now and then, I come across a community that has landed on a winning formula and Effingham, Illinois is such a community. This rural Illinois city of 14,000 is set amidst hundreds of thousands of acres of soybeans, corn, and wheat fields, bisected by not one but two major interstates, and whose county is home to six high schools. All in a county of just 34,000. The community is chock-full of innovative small business people and seems to pulsate with unusually high entrepreneurial energy, all of which is connected to a central business advocacy presided over by one of the Nation’s longest serving and most highly respected chamber of commerce leader — Norma Lansing. Norma joins us today to talk about how this community has made the most of its business and education connectedness, how they’ve managed through the pandemic and have come out stronger, and how they are preparing their young people for a productive future with home-grown commitment to education and career development.