With its education fund projected to slide more than $1 million into the red this year, Des Plaines District 62 is gearing up to create a special task force to help shape the district’s financial future.
Few question the need for clearer fiscal direction. But the timing of the plan–coming just over a month before the Nov. 4 school board elections–has some critics crying politics.
“It’s a bunch of bull, this financial thing,” said board member Jean Warren, who heads up the board’s financial committee. “Why now?”
At first glance, District 62 appears the picture of fiscal health. Even with the education fund running deficits the past three years, the district has been able to tap into its hefty reserves to plug the necessary holes and ward off a crippling financial dilemma.
Still, some estimates indicate the well could run dangerously low within four years. And while any number of factors–from enrollment numbers to political whims–could alter this forecast, Supt. Bob Willis is preparing for the worst and backing the task force’s creation sometime this fall.
The idea is simple enough: Reach out to the community that pays the district’s bills and invite the residents, businesses and political leaders to help erase, or at least delay, the need for a steep tax increase.
But in District 62, decisions about the future rarely are simple matters.
According to Willis, time is the enemy and any delay in making a creative financial plan could force the district to seek its first tax hike since 1969. “At some point it is going to hit,” he warned.
But to Warren, the task force is all about politics–about projecting an image of responsibility and concern ahead of the November election to protect the status quo.
Willis and the rest of the board “have so much nerve and so much power,” she said. “This is not a check and balance thing.”
Bad blood has existed in the district since Willis’ appointment four years ago. One of the more heated battles was waged last year as Willis ushered through a building utilization plan that called for the conversion of Iroquois Junior High into a year-round community school.
So this latest spin comes as little surprise. Four seats are up for grabs in the election, including those of Warren and Bass–who was appointed last year to replace Warren’s lone sympathizer on the board, Arnold Agnos.
The seats of Janet Kucera and Margaret Wagner also are up, but both have chosen not to run. In addition to Warren and Bass, six candidates are vying for the four spots: Joann Braam, Joseph Catalano, Manuel Bustos Jr., Nancy Fornoff, Kevin Shyne and Anne Marie Coogan.
Should Warren and a slate of like-minded candidates prevail in the election, the balance of power on the seven-member board would dramatically shift.
And such a change could quash the task force before it even gets off the ground, warned veteran board member and Willis ally, Dan Fletcher. “No matter what we try to do, it all goes back to politics.”
District 62, which includes most of Des Plaines, for the past three years has been running a deficit in its education fund, which accounts for about 75 percent of its $40 million budget.
The fund has reserves of about $11 million. But according to Deputy Supt. Raymond Gunn, these reserves quickly are shrinking under the weight of tax caps, rising costs and a diminished supply of land suited for development in Des Plaines.
Without real financial planning, the reserves threaten to dry up by 2002, which will cause the district to tap into its working cash fund and lose the interest generated by that fund.
“It is coming,” said Fletcher. “That doesn’t mean tomorrow, but it’s in the near future.”
