Oak Lawn-Hometown School District 123 is excited to welcome Amanda Crossley to Sward Elementary as the Associate Principal for the 2025-26 school year. Amanda Crossley started meeting with staff members on April 1 and with families at the April 2 PTA meeting. She is looking forward to meeting Sward Eagles and families on May 6 at 3:45 PM during Sward’s Popsicles with the Principals event.
Read Amanda Crossley's biography below.
Since college, Amanda Crossley has been on a mission to improve the lives of children. From scheduling weekly time to volunteer several times a week at a local preschool during her undergraduate college years at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign to her current role as an assistant principal in the south suburbs of Chicago, she has always put the educational needs of the children she serves at the forefront of her endeavors. While teaching in Homewood, Illinois, she traveled across the country to train under the founders of the Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED) program, bringing their program and its principles back to her district. She then worked passionately to bring diversity, equity, and tolerance to her district’s classrooms, spending over a decade of her career focusing on training and guiding students, teachers, administrators, and community members to open their minds and hearts to educational equity and diversity. Realizing that she wanted to effect this sort of change on a larger scale, Amanda obtained her second masters degree in educational administration. She continued that same difficult work in her daily efforts as she co-led various buildings in Joliet, Illinois. Because of the large size of that particular district, she was given the opportunity to gain insight and experience leading programming that addressed a wide range of behavioral, academic, and linguistic needs throughout several buildings that ranged from 200 to nearly 1,000 students per building.
In Orland Park, Illinois, Amanda co-led a diverse building of approximately 600 3rd-5th grade students that included the high needs Special Education and the gifted programming for the entire district. For this new and exciting experience, she was able to call upon her work with multi-language and exceptional learners from every level to successfully address the collective challenges of all the students of building.
Anyone who has ever worked with Amanda will tell you that she is a relationship builder. Walking through the halls of any building she is in, you will find her face-to-face with her students, walking and talking with staff, and reaching out to and sharing with families. Making connections and working hard to maintain them is something that Amanda is passionate about. It has become a non-negotiable trademark of her leadership. She becomes a steadfast member of her building and its community and lets that drive her decisions, her relationships, and her passion.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the disparities in public education, mainly through the glaring imbalance between what is available to and attainable by children of color, multi-language learners, and students with disabilities. Those disparities have given Amanda the drive to work tirelessly to facilitate access to quality education by finding ways to embrace and sustain alternative methods of academic delivery such as digital learning to reach children and their families in new and exciting ways. “With our current educational structure, I feel that many children have the rugs pulled out from underneath them before they even realize that they were standing on one. Basically, it sets the stage for our black and brown, differently-abled, newcomers and sometimes even our uniquely gifted learners for less than optimal achievement. I will continue fighting to make education better for them because their futures depend on us,” Amanda says.
Amanda’s next chapter will take her to Sward Elementary in Oak Lawn, Illinois, where she will leverage her 20 years of educational experience with her expertise in multilingual and special education and her passion for connections to help a dedicated team of educators continue to shape students into their best selves.
When not at school, Amanda spends her days running around town with her husband, Cornelius, heading to events for their three busy little boys, Cornelius Jr. (10), Connor (7), and Cody (5). She can be found coaching her oldest on the soccer field, snuggled on her couch reading the newest thriller, or being the “fun auntie” to her nephew, Micah (2).