Township High School District 214’s boundaries pretty closely overlap with the twin House Districts of 53 and 54, and in November, those voters will be asked to approve a referendum issuing $300 million in bonds for projects called “Renew 214.”
I addressed this way back almost a year ago, when the district was still floating a $850 million referendum. They’ve pared this back to $300 million. At the meeting when the board decided on the lowered amount, I observed the newer board members working to come to a consensus, pushing up against the longtime board members, trying to meet the needs the administration was insisting needed to be remedied, but at the lowest possible bond level, and felt encouraged by these positive signs.
But I am not persuaded by the current district “sales pitch” for the referendum.
Prior to seeing these materials, I believed there was a case to be made for support. After all, it was under the leadership of the prior superintendent, David Schuler, and under board members who have left or are now in the minority, that spending decisions were made to build new pools and a black box theater, to expand career and technical education with costly underutilized specialized offerings replicated in schools across the district rather than consolidated, to chase accolades rather than doing the hard work of keeping on track with basic school infrastructure needs.
But to establish credibility, I wanted to see a plan.
I wanted to see the full details of how the money would be spent, from soup to nuts. Is the planned work based on needs, what’s long overdue or what risks catastrophic failures if not dealt with, or are they moving forward projects that could reasonably be done 5 or 10 or even more years in the future, solely in order to be able to include them in bond-funded spending?
And I wanted to see a plan to ensure this is a true one-time referendum, by incorporating more reserves into future budgeting so that when roof replacement comes due the next time, the reserves are there rather than having been spent on special projects in the endless effort to compete with Stevenson and New Trier.
The information that the district has now put forth on their website contains none of that. No breakdowns, no long-term plans.
Worse, the information strongly implies that they view it as perfectly ordinary to have referendums on a 50 year cycle.
Rather than admit to failed priorities in the past, the district insists that there were no missteps, but that it is simply impossible to fund boiler or roof replacements out of tax revenues.
This is the equivalent to saying “yes, I need to get a loan to replace my furnace because I used the money to go to Disney, but I’m still great at financial management because, after all, I did the responsible thing by changing the air filter all those years in the meantime.”
And what’s worse is that, exactly as the consultant EO Sullivan promised they would help create, there is now a “parent PAC” called Vote Yes for All District 214 Schools which filed its PAC Statement of Organization disclosure form today, with already $5,000 in the bank. Illinois law on political organizations says the first $5,000 is free from disclosure as to its sources, so we’ll never know whether it’s money from unions or contractors, but one of the two chairs was also chair of the District 21 Vote Yes to Secure Our Children’s Future PAC in 2018, which was funded by teacher’s unions, a school food service vendor, and multiple contractors specializing in school buildings, to the tune of over $50,000. How can parents and taxpayers compete against these deep-pocket donors?
This is not OK.
The existing legacy board members have a duty to step aside and acknowledge that they did not exercise the oversight they claimed to have done, election after election.
And the administration has a duty to plan for a future in which referendums never happen again.