By all appearances, Country Club Hills and Glen Ellyn, towns separated by miles and money, would have little in common.
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But school districts in the racially changing south suburb and the prestigious Du Page enclave are discovering that they share more problems than they thought.
In the wake of the bankrupt North Chicago school system’s decision last week to dissolve and divide its 4,300 students among its richer neighbors, poor and affluent districts alike are realizing that the old ways of financing education aren’t working.
An alarming number of communities across the U.S. are coming to the same conclusion as they watch dwindling revenues, fed-up taxpayers and the recession force schools to make deep cuts-or simply throw in the towel.
For hard-pressed schools, like those in Country Club Hills Elementary District 160, North Chicago’s plight provides evidence for voters and lawmakers that the schools haven’t just been crying wolf and that their richer neighbors ought to be concerned.
Those rich neighbors now have two reasons to worry.
If the North Chicago school system is permitted to fade away, leaving neighboring districts in towns like Libertyville and Lake Forest to pick up the pieces, what incentive is there for any other struggling district to shoulder its burden and carry on?
For many, the prospect of letting someone else pick up the tab could be very appealing.
And even those relatively well-off school districts, such as Glenbard High School District 87 in Glen Ellyn, are for the first time facing serious budget shortfalls and are making substantive program cuts as state aid dwindles and voters grow ever more weary of tax increases.
The North Chicago case is an extreme example of what happens when traditional methods of school funding fail. Many believe that if state lawmakers do not address the broader issue of school funding in Illinois, the courts likely will.
Robert Leininger, the state schools superintendent, calls the North Chicago closing “the tip of the iceberg.”
“This is not talk, this is serious,” added Country Club Hills Supt. Ed Chartraw. “If it can happen there, it can happen here. It’s a `There but for the grace of God go I’ thing.”
In recent years, Chartraw has watched his district make just about every budget cut possible as tax-increase proposal after tax-increase proposal has failed at the polls. Buses, lunch, recess and plenty of staff and teachers have disappeared. A few extracurricular activities survive only because a parent foundation now foots the cost.
He sees North Chicago’s decision as opening a new possibility for ailing schools, giving them leverage with the voters. But more important, Chartraw sees it as a way to make state and federal officials address that hottest of potatoes: declining financial support for schools.
“I don’t want to sound unsympathetic,” he said. “But part of me is glad something like this has finally happened. When a good-sized district like North Chicago goes out of business, it hits people in decision-making positions with a 2-by-4 between the eyes.”
School officials in wealthy Glen Ellyn, meanwhile, concede that the events in North Chicago are forcing them to think about the eventual consequence of trends already afoot in their own schools.
Trapped by the collar-county tax cap, the highly regarded Glenbard High School district has cut $1.9 million out of this year’s budget and is carrying an $877,000 deficit for the first time, said district spokeswoman Julie Armantrout. Next year the deficit will rise to $3.1 million, she predicted.
Though the district has unused taxing authority, the tax cap has essentially penalized the school for being thrifty and not taxing to its limits in the past, Armantrout said.
Now, for the first time, Glenbard-like many prestigious schools in similar situations-faces the same problems poorer neighbors have grappled with for years.
National education experts predict the financial problems will only get worse, as federal, state and local governments increasingly find themselves short of cash. Altogether, 38 states now are having trouble funding education, said a study by the National Education Association.
“There is real concern in many parts of the country because so many states are floating in a sea of red ink as a result of the recession and lagging property values,” said Gary Marx, spokesman for the American Association of School Administrators in Washington.
“You have many school districts across the country that have gone as far as they can go in terms of making cuts,” he said.
In California, nearly a dozen school districts have become financially insolvent since 1987, nine in the San Francisco area.
One of them, Richmond Unified School District, declared bankruptcy in April 1990 and announced plans to close. Parents sued the state and won, forcing California to finance the school.
And in Michigan, Kalkaska County’s school system shut its doors for three months early last week rather than face a $1.5 million shortfall after voters in the poor community refused for the third time to increase property taxes.
“I believe now we are on the edge of educational disaster if something is not done to change the way schools are funded,” Supt. Doyle Disbrow said Friday.
“Overall we’re seeing a lot of local school districts just barely making it,” said Mary Fulton, a policy analyst at the Denver-based Education Commission of the States. “The Kalkaska situation is an illustration of what is going to happen to a number of school districts nationwide that are on the brink of bankruptcy.”
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Efforts to resolve funding problems in state legislatures, however, have mostly disintegrated into stalling, partisan spats and finger-pointing among politicians who feel more pressure to keep taxes low than to improve education.
Despite the draconian measures taken by North Chicago, the dissolution has not yet spurred any move in Springfield to overhaul Illinois’ complicated and controversial way of financing its 900 school districts.
Instead, state Sen. William Peterson (R-Long Grove) pointed to organizational, managerial and accountability problems with North Chicago school officials, arguing that inadequate state funding wasn’t the only problem.
State Sen. Arthur Berman (D-Chicago) also suggested federal spending cuts were at least partially to blame.
But Berman, who last year pushed a failed referendum proposal to force the state to pay at least 50 percent of the cost of educating public school children, also pointed to figures showing that the state’s share of the school financing pie has fallen from 42.3 percent to 33.6 percent since 1980, while the property-tax payers’ share has risen from 47.4 percent to 58 percent.
The effect of that drop in the state’s share on the North Chicago district is clear in a comparison with the similar Mad River School District adjoining Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.
Like North Chicago, that district teaches many students from military families whose costs are not fully met by the federal government. The school gets $1,500 a year per student (compared to $1,300 in North Chicago), while overall per-pupil spending is closer to $5,000.
But Ohio chips in for about 50 percent of the school’s costs, compared to 33.6 percent in Illinois. That extra 17 percent allows the Mad River School District to squeak by, Supt. Alex DiNino said.
Berman and others see such disparities as evidence that Illinois isn’t doing its share. What it will take to change things isn’t clear, but some believe that a few affluent districts will have to shut down before the legislature acts.
“I’ve been around the General Assembly for many years,” Leininger said. “When does the General Assembly react? When we have a crisis. I think that’s beginning to happen.”
Leininger and other school officials think the whole mess could be resolved in the courts. Legal challenges already are being filed against North Chicago’s plan to dissolve next year, and that could give judges an opening to essentially reform the system by themselves.
That threat could spur Springfield to act, some observers believe.
“What I’m hoping is the legislators, confronted with the possibility that the courts will make a landmark decision, will (make changes) first, to keep power in the General Assembly,” Chartraw said.