In a community where many parents don’t bat an eye at spending $300 or more on a new bicycle for their children, how could a school referendum proposal that would amount to a comparable property-tax bite go down in defeat?
That’s what happened Tuesday in Wilmette, even after school officials warned that a defeat would mean the termination of 28 teachers, larger class sizes and still-deeper cuts in curriculum.
Despite warnings from most of the school board in Wilmette School District 39, the response by a slim majority of voters amounted to: “We don’t believe you.”
Such a chorus of protest among the affluent has been heard elsewhere in the Chicago area, including in Barrington School District 220 in the northwest suburbs, where voters on Tuesday agreed to a severely pared-down tax increase request after rejecting previous proposals.
Some find irony in the Wilmette defeat and the hardships that Barrington has faced. It appears that school districts in affluent communities must undergo considerable pain before voters are willing to write a larger check to the county collector’s office.
In Barrington, for example, voters twice rejected referendum proposals–one in 1995 for $112 million and the other in 1996 for $92 million–before they approved one Tuesday for $19.4 million.
“Just because you are affluent doesn’t mean that you are carefree with your money,” said Diane Joseph of Barrington, who has been critical of previous referendum attempts. “People with money, particularly old money, don’t throw it away.”
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The smaller figure apparently made Tuesday’s proposal more palatable to Barrington-area voters. The district plans to follow this winning formula with another referendum proposal in 1998 for up to $53 million.
DePaul University economics professor William Sander said that most researchers have found the relationship between increased spending and improved academic performance is “either very modest or maybe even zero.” Moreover, Sander said, in affluent communities that already pay more in taxes and spend more on schools than average, a tax increase can be a particularly hard sell.
In some affluent areas such as Wilmette, where there are many households with senior citizens or with children in private schools, a relatively large bloc of voters may perceive that they have no direct stake in the public school system, said John Pelissero, Loyola University Chicago political science professor.
Based on interviews conducted in the wake of a 145-vote defeat in Wilmette, it appears that senior citizens weren’t the only voters who told school administrators in the affluent North Shore community to live within their current means.
Even some parents of District 39 pupils, reacting to a school system seemingly flush with cash reserves and a history of signing teacher contracts that routinely exceed the cost of living, felt confident enough to call what they apparently considered a bluff.
“I think it’s very good that it did not pass,” said a woman who identified herself as a retired teacher and longtime Wilmette resident, but who declined to give her name. “Hospitals and schools are big business today, and it’s time they curtailed their costs. . . . I paid taxes all my life, and I’m sick and tired of the increases.”
Wilmette school officials sought an increase in the education-fund tax rate. Half of the increase would have been used to wipe out a $1.1 million spending deficit.
Though expenditures outstrip revenue in District 39’s current $27.9 million budget, the 3,340-pupil district has $10 million in reserves in a special working fund and up to $10 million more in life-safety and surplus fund accounts, officials said.
An anti-tax increase group that formed just weeks before the election argued that some of these surplus funds should be spent before taxes are increased, but district officials cautioned that deficit spending, increasing enrollment and uncertainty about the timing of state reimbursements meant that they need cash on hand.
Administration officials say they have already cut $7.5 million worth of educational programs over the last seven years and will be forced to whittle away other class offerings following Tuesday’s defeat.
“We already have a fairly bare-bones, no-frills curriculum compared to other schools in the area, and it’s only going to get worse now,” said Sue Rasher, District 39’s school board president. “Yes, our kids are performing quite well with the basic programs we have, but people in this town spend that much (the equivalent of the defeated referendum’s tax increase) going out to dinner.
“The vote in Wilmette should be a very sobering experience for school districts everywhere because if we can’t agree to head off a financial crisis in Wilmette, where is there any hope?”