Students who attend or plan to attend Homewood-Flossmoor High School but do not live in School District 233 are being put on notice that they will be caught and could end up with a hefty tuition bill.
To clamp down on the non-residency issue, the south suburban high school district has said it is assigning a staff person full time this summer to locate non-residents who are enrolled or trying to enroll in the school.
The district has recognized the non-resident problem for several years and has been cracking down on students living outside the district.
But now the district’s Parent-Teacher Discipline Committee is urging it to do even more to address the problem, saying that too many tax dollars paid by district residents for the school are being spent on students who do not belong at Homewood-Flossmoor.
“When you have an award-winning school like ours, people will try to enroll,” said Anthony Moriarty, Homewood-Flossmoor’s principal. And although there’s no indication that there has been an increase in the non-resident problem, “awareness of its magnitude has gone up,” he said.
Non-resident students who have been attending Homewood-Flossmoor are expected to reimburse the district $10,304, the amount the district estimates it spends on educating each student each year. Moriarty concedes, however, that collection efforts aren’t always fruitful.
District 233 does monthly checks with Homewood’s Elementary School District 153 and Flossmoor’s Elementary School District 161, its feeder districts, in trying to eliminate the problem.
Still, the school board decided to increase its efforts to locate non-resident students over the summer because it’s easier to find the problem cases “earlier rather than later” into the school year, Moriarty said.
“We take this [non-resident issue] very seriously,” said Supt. Laura Murray. “This is one instance where we welcome tips [about non-resident students] from anonymous callers. Give us a tip on a non-resident, and we’ll follow up on it.”
Zero tolerance: Several dozen drivers, especially truck drivers, recently learned the hard way that going even one mile over the 30-m.p.h. speed limit along Ridge Road in Homewood will result in a speeding ticket.
The crackdown is in response to concerns by the Homewood Village Board and Mayor Richard Hofeld about the steady stream of gravel trucks that use Ridge Road to access Thornton Quarry, Police Chief Dan McDevitt said.
Police are trying to make sure trucks observe the speed limit, because letters from village officials and residents to trucking firms and truck drivers have failed to get them to use alternate routes, and because the trucks cannot be banned from a state road, McDevitt said.
McDevitt would like to see truckers head north on Halsted Street to either 175th or 171st Streets, rather than proceeding west on Ridge Road into downtown Homewood.
The problem is that when the trucks drive down Ridge Road, they’re “going past the Izaak Walton facility, the Homewood Little League Field, Lions Park and pool, a residential neighborhood, the always crowded Dairy Queen, Irwin Park with its nice new tot lot and baseball field, and downtown Homewood,” McDevitt said.
Truck drivers, however, aren’t the only ones being targeted for speeding.
Car drivers also are being subjected to the same zero-tolerance policy, McDevitt said. One car recently was clocked at 50 m.p.h., and many have been clocked going over 40 m.p.h., he said.
“We’re not trying to give anyone a hard time,” McDevitt said. “We just want to make it clear to everyone that the posted 30-m.p.h. speed limit on Ridge is not a speed suggestion. It’s the limit.”
