The familiar sound of school bells is being heard again throughout the southwest suburbs as students return to the classroom this week for the new school year.
Just as familiar are the funding and overcrowding problems that face many school districts within the region–as well as throughout the metropolitan area and state.
Local school officials held hopes last spring that these problems would be addressed by the school-funding reform considered by state legislators in Springfield.
But that issue, which would have raised state income taxes, was dealt with in a way also familiar to school officials–by doing nothing. So the new school year finds them again having to make do–asking voters for more money, cramming students into already crowded classrooms and hoping some solution will be found someday.
“We’re all in the same boat,” said Bernard Jumbeck, superintendent of Chicago Ridge Elementary School District 127 1/2. “And the fact that Gov. Jim Edgar, who led the fight for funding reform, has decided not to seek re-election, doesn’t bode well, at least for the near term.”
The short-term solution for Jumbeck’s district, as well as Joliet District 86 and others, is to ask voters for help.
The District 127 1/2 board this week approved placing two proposals on the November ballot: one to increase the education fund tax rate by 25 cents per $100 of equalized assessed valuation and the other to increase the operations and maintenance fund tax rate by 75 cents per $100 of equalized assessed valuation.
The increases would boost the education fund tax rate to 50 cents per $100 of equalized assessed valuation and the operations and maintenance fund rate to nearly $2.73. If approved, Jumbeck said the increases would generate an additional $1.1 million annually.
Asking homeowners to pay more property taxes for schools is not something district officials want to do, Jumbeck said. But the alternative would be to allow the district’s three school buildings, already badly in need of repairs, to deteriorate further, he said.
The district already has had to trim its music and art programs, leaving its 1,100 pupils with a “bare bones” academic curriculum, he said. Any additional cuts that might have to be made should the educational tax increase proposal fail are “unthinkable,” he said.
“Like everyone else, we’ve tried to hold off proposing tax hikes to see where our legislators were going to go (with school funding reform),” Jumbeck said. “Unfortunately, they didn’t go in the direction we wanted them to go.”
Indeed, the legislature’s failure has left many school superintendents frustrated and angered.
“It’s unfortunate that students have to be pawns of the politicians in this state,” said Homer Township Elementary School District 33C Supt. Edward Karns, who noted that since he came to the fast-growing district 12 years ago, the portion of the district’s budget covered by state funding has dropped to 23 percent from 50 percent.
The primary difficulty facing his district is a familiar one, especially in rapidly developing Will County and in some south Cook County suburbs where housing development is booming.
District 33C, which has grown from 87 students in one school in the mid-1950s to more than 2,700 in three buildings today, is dealing with its ongoing battle against overcrowding this year by shifting students from one school building to another.
The shuffling likely will continue until the state increases school funding or taxpayers approve a proposal to raise money to build additional schools, Karns said.
Lincoln-Way High School District 210 in Will County is also faced with crowding. Officials say they have no choice but to build additional classroom space–and soon.
District officials are wrestling with how best to do that. The district’s enrollment totals more than 4,000; its freshman-sophomore campus in Frankfort and junior-senior campus in New Lenox hold a combined capacity of 5,000 students.
One option would be to expand the two existing buildings to accommodate 3,500 students each. Another would be to convert the two existing campuses into separate high schools and build a third school at 191st Street and Harlem Avenue in the northeast corner of the district.
An advisory committee is expected to make recommendation to the school board in late September.
Either would be expensive and require that voters approve a tax hike. According to one preliminary calculation, enlarging the schools would increase the property tax bill on a $150,000 home by $65 a year. A third school would increase the tax on a similarly valued home by about $77.50 annually.
Officials at Consolidated High School District 230, which encompasses Sandburg, Andrew and Stagg High Schools in southwest Cook County, also are considering building another school to meet future enrollment growth.
But unlike their counterparts at Lincoln-Way, it appears they will have a little more time to consider options. District enrollment, unlike in previous years, appears to be stable this year, district officials report.
