Before North Chicago’s unprecedented school dissolution plan was delivered to county officials Tuesday, the questions began.
Can the more than 11,500 students in North Chicago and neighboring districts continue going to their same schools? Will property taxes go up? Will there be forced busing between North Chicago and surrounding towns?
The answers to those three questions appear to be: probably, likely and maybe.
Definitive answers, however, may be months or even years away because the entire matter is likely to become the subject of numerous and protracted lawsuits.
On Monday night, the school board for financially faltering North Chicago School District 187 approved a plan that would send its 4,300 students to five neighboring school districts as early as this fall.
North Chicago’s high school students would be dispersed to Libertyville and Lake Forest, while elementary pupils would go to the Lake Bluff, Woodland and Oak Grove school districts under a plan that would have to be approved by Lake County’s Board of Regional Superintendents.
What happens under a dissolution is that the North Chicago school district would cease to exist and the three elementary and two high school districts would expand their boundaries, said Karol Richardson, associate superintendent of finance for the Illinois State Board of Education.
“In essence, what you are doing are creating new school district boundaries, hence new taxing boundaries,” Richardson said.
That means that North Chicago’s neighbors would become financially responsible for North Chicago’s students. If those neighboring communities want to maintain per-pupil spending at current levels, they would have to raise property taxes. If they don’t, per-pupil spending would decline.
Oak Grove School District 68 illustrates the complexity of the problem. Once the North Chicago pupils arrive, its enrollment of 561 would balloon to 1,861.
District 68 now spends $6,506 a pupil. With the influx, per-pupil spending would fall significantly unless residents of the expanded school district are willing to raise property taxes through a referendum proposal, school officials said.
“If we wind up spending that much less per student, the overall educational program will be of lesser quality,” said Supt. Patrick Patt.
The issue also is complicated by the number of military students that could be sent to Oak Grove and to the other school districts. The federal government spends $1,300 a student of so-called Impact Aid money.
The federal money falls far below what Oak Grove spends per pupil, Patt said.
“That’s not going to do anything for us in terms of providing a quality education,” he said. “If we get a large number of military students with the same level of Impact Aid, we will have the same problem as North Chicago had.”
But money is not the only issue residents and school officials in the neighboring district would face.
If the minority populations of North Chicago are not integrated into the newly expanded districts, then those systems could risk a legal challenge that may lead to forced busing.
Seventy percent of North Chicago’s students are minorities, while more than 90 percent of the students in the surrounding school districts are white.
“They cannot keep North Chicago students from coming to their schools because they don’t want minorities in their schools,” said David Strauss, a law professor at the University of Chicago.
If there was a legal challenge of how the minority population was dispersed throughout the districts, it would probably have to come from a parent or student within the new districts, Strauss said.
State education officials said they have no power to regulate a desegregation plan. That authority belongs to the federal courts.
If a court ruled that a district has segregated its minority students, then the federal court would have to approve and oversee a desegregation plan, state officials said.
If no legal challenge is made, however, it is possible that all of the thousands of students in the affected districts could continue going to school where they are now.
