As a concerned resident and parent of a child in Community Consolidated School District No. 93, I have strong misgivings about the $17.2 million school referendum on the March 17 ballot.
For instance, there are no plans to implement a hot lunch program. They are just proposing to remodel the buildings to provide facilities for a hot lunch program.
Enrollment is expected to begin to decline before the $17.2 million would be paid off. According to school administrators, when enrollment begins to decline, Carol Stream School will either be closed or used entirely for special educational purposes. The effect that closing that school will have on property values will be devastating.
The plan also includes reconfiguration of the grade levels. Stratford Junior High and Jay Stream School will be used for 6th, 7th and 8th grades. Stratford is a state-of-the-art facility. Jay Stream was a disaster of design as an elementary school, inadequate as a 6-through-8 building in the past, and now they propose to do another patchup job on it and make it a 6-through-8 building again. That will put half of our junior high population in a state-of-the-art building and the other half in a substandard facility. Not coincidentally, the section of the village in jeopardy of losing its local school will also feed into Jay Stream.
There are no specific references to one firm educational benefit from this referendum. In fact, no firm educational plan is in place to utilize the changes once they have been made. How do they know what to ask for if they don’t know what they’re going to do with it when they get it?
I encourage residents to attend the informational meetings being held in the schools and ask a lot of questions. I think they will be surprised by the answers. We need to remind our school board members that they have been elected to represent all of the community and not just certain subdivisions. Make sure you have all of the facts before you vote on March 17.
