No one cried Tuesday for North Chicago schools.
In fact, some students of the beleaguered school system that acknowledged defeat Monday night cheered.
Some students in predominantly white adjoining school districts suggested that they might learn about their more culturally diverse neighbors by sending them into their districts.
But those were perhaps the only upbeat sounds that arose Tuesday as an uncomfortable Lake County faced the prospect of the largest school dissolution in Illinois history.
Anger. Disbelief. Skepticism. Even betrayal. People who had moved to Lake County years ago thinking they had left behind the problems of urban schools found those problems were suddenly at their doorstep.
Questions were many. Time and again, people asked: If North Chicago schools give up and ask for their neighbors’ help, who will be next?
Answers were few.
The issues-race, money, parents’ wanting the best for their children-could not get more sensitive.
At the end of school Tuesday, Toya Robins, a North Chicago High School senior standing on the curb waiting for a ride, voiced what seemed to get lost in much of the day’s discussions.
“Education is the thing,” she said.
– “Our school is closing! Our school is closing!” a group of North Chicago High School students cheered as they skipped down the school’s front walk just after classes ended Tuesday.
Senior Jesse Ross watched them and thought he understood why they would cheer rather than cry at the prospect of being forced to go somewhere else.
“There’s nothing much left here,” he said with a shrug. “We’ve been putting up with the same thing ever since I got here four years ago. We don’t have new books. All our extracurricular activities are gone.”
The things other high school graduates might feel nostalgic about, the band or the yearbook, have been gone for years. Long ago the list of things North Chicago High does without grew perhaps longer than the list of the items it held on to.
Nonetheless, Monica Joplin, a junior standing on the curb waiting for a ride, was not cheering.
“I’m not too enthused about this because they don’t want us in these other schools and I don’t know if we can all get along,” she said.
Robins, standing beside her, said: “You’ve got to go where you’re going to get a chance to learn and grow, and you can’t really do that here. Not like you should, anyway.”
– At The Whistle Stop Cafe in Libertyville, the coffee was steaming Tuesday morning-and so were the patrons.
In the regular coffee klatch, no one was happy with the news from North Chicago.
“I don’t think there’s anybody in this town who would say those kids aren’t entitled to a good education,” said Mary Robertson, whose two children graduated from Libertyville schools. “They absolutely are. . . . But not at the expense of a system and a community.”
Anger at government burned as steadily as the cigarettes at the tables. What happened to the vaunted Illinois lottery money that was targeted for education? Why isn’t the federal government paying its share to educate students in North Chicago? What will be the next school district to fold and look for help from neighboring schools?
Property values will go down, of that they were sure. So would the reputation of the Libertyville schools.
– They still don’t believe it in Lake Forest.
The news that District 115 might have to take in 225 students from North Chicago did not set off any panic. Most residents think that it will not come to pass or that it will be entangled in legal wrangling for years.
“It won’t happen,” said Don Gradowski, 16, as he stood in front of a bookstore on Western Avenue.
Dr. John Baltzel, walking through the Square on his way to the post office, said neighbors of North Chicago will stall the dissolution.
“I wonder does it open up a Pandora’s box,” Baltzel said. “What’s to stop (the troubled school system in) Chicago from throwing up its hands and passing the bill?”
Lake Forest residents fear their children could be bused to North Chicago. And while people in the city that symbolizes Lake County wealth expressed sympathy for the schoolchildren in North Chicago, they wondered whether the Lake Forest schools would be the answer.
“I know they will enjoy our school,” said Dr. George E. Kearns, a dentist. “But the environment is so different for them.”
– If the afternoon was cloudy, so, too, was the view of Libertyville High School students about the prospect of 625 North Chicago students joining them. Most students agree the school is already too crowded.
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“If they have to come here, they have to come,” said Joseph Ortiz, a junior. “We all have that right for an education.”
Standing in the afternoon drizzle, Ortiz said he saw reason for optimism about the decision.
“I think it would add a little more cultural diversity to the school,” he said. “There’s no doubt we could use it.”
But other students said they believe North Chicago students will bring problems.
“I think it would cause too much racial tension,” Kelly Grange, a sophomore said. “I think our tax dollars should benefit students in Libertyville, not North Chicago.”
Sitting in a car, waiting on her daughter and a couple of friends, Margo Bath recalled why she and her husband chose to move to Libertyville 17 years ago. They looked at other suburbs, where they could have bought a larger house, she recalled.
“We opted for a smaller house here because of the schools,” she said.
Hundreds of new students at Libertyville High?
“Impossible,” she said. “There’s not enough room for our own kids.”
Sheila Brooks, who has two sons at Libertyville High, dashed to the school when she heard the media were about. She was angry, and she wanted people to know it.
“Yes, North Chicago deserves to have good schools,” she said.
But more is at stake, Brooks said.
“It’s just not fair to ask us to take someone else’s financial responsibilities,” she said. “I can’t say, `Gee, I didn’t budget for our taxes this year, so, neighbor, you pay.’ “
– The news from North Chicago hit few districts harder than Woodland Elementary School District in Gages Lake. The district has 3,215 pupils, and under the North Chicago plan, it would grow by about half.
Herding their children toward the front doors at the close of the school day, parents were grim when considering the possibilities.
“I’m shocked. Scared and shocked,” said Colleen Kramer as she packed her two children into the back of a station wagon.
She said that if the plans laid out by North Chicago come to pass, she would consider moving her family to another district.
– “We knew it was coming,” people in North Chicago said.
People seemed resigned to the news all across North Chicago, from City Hall on Lewis Avenue to McDonald’s on King Drive and from the Bowlarium on Sheridan Road to Fat Charlie’s soul food restaurant on 10th Street.
In the parking lot of Neal Elementary School, some parents huddled in small groups, shaking their heads about the future as they waited for their children at the end of the school day.
“What else can we do?” said one disgruntled father, echoing the thoughts of the North Chicago school board members as they made their decision the night before. With that, he put his young son into the front seat of his pickup truck and drove away.
– Oak Grove School in Green Oaks is the kind of place where everybody knows everybody. On Tuesday, parents of children in the tiny school district confronted the prospect of admitting strangers-some 1,300 of them from North Chicago.
On Tuesday afternoon, children shrieked happily as they poured out of the school and into family vans and school buses for the trip home.
A few parents said they feared that the family atmosphere the district has cultivated is threatened by the North Chicago plan.
“It affects the whole character of the school,” said Wendy Holliman, president of the Parent-Teacher Organization.
Holliman said she found it amazing that anyone would consider sending such a large number of students to such a small school district. Holliman, like her colleagues in the PTO, lives in Green Oaks to be near the close-knit school family.
“We look out for each other here,” Marilyn McBride said. “That would be lost” if the district takes the North Chicago pupils, she said.
Oak Grove and North Chicago pupils alike would be emotionally hurt by the upheaval, she said.
“Everyone is forgetting about the kids in this,” McBride said. “There are no winners here.”