When Cindy Van Ort learned Crete-Monee school officials planned to save money by closing her kids’ elementary school, she launched a door-to-door campaign urging parents to protest.
After Betsy Williams heard administrators sliced the choral music program at Crete-Monee’s elementary schools, she hatched an effort to raise money for the music teacher’s salary.
Upon discovering the school district faced a $2.7 million deficit, Mike Turay marched a group of parents to Springfield to ask Senate President James “Pate” Philip for help.
And they are not alone.
Hundreds of Crete-Monee parents have given up their comfortable sideline seats and jumped into the exhausting political and economic arena of running a cash-starved school district. Organized in January under the umbrella group, Community Action Team, they have halted the rumored closure of two elementary schools, saved music and sports programs, convinced business owners to donate thousands of dollars, and prodded municipalities to share tax money.
Last week, they launched a districtwide effort to raise $1 million.
“When we found out the school district was in trouble we said, `There are two things we can do. We can be miserable and be victims, or we can work toward a solution,’ ” recalled Van Ort, a Park Forest lawyer and mother of two. “We chose the latter because these are our kids and we have a responsibility to make sure they get a quality education.”
Parents joining together to ward off painful school budget cuts is not unusual. What makes the Crete-Monee District 201-U effort noteworthy is its breadth.
The district–one of the state’s largest in terms of sheer area–stretches 78 square miles from the middle- and upper-middle-class suburbs of Park Forest and Crete to the largely agricultural Monee. With very little commercial property, the bulk of the school budget comes from property taxes paid by homeowners. And taxpayers in each of those communities have joined the fight.
And they put aside special interests to do it. When the school board cut choral music at the elementary schools, it was the high school parents who jumped in to save the award-winning program. When the school board wanted to close two schools, parents did not pit the benefits of one school against the other. Instead, they demanded both be kept open.
“It would have been easy for us to be shortsighted and selfish and say, `Go ahead and cut whatever you want, just don’t touch my program,’ ” said Betsy Williams, fundraising chairman for the Choral Music Association. “But if we’re going to work out the district’s problems, we have to work together and look at what’s best for our kids, for other students and for future students.”
Crete-Monee’s problems began 40 years ago when the district started borrowing money to fill a chronic void between what it collected and what it spent. Its financial plight worsened in 1991 when legislators instituted property tax caps.
The legislation left many schools beleaguered, but it had a more pronounced effect on Crete-Monee because the district has a limited commercial tax base and is composed mainly of farmland–which is taxed at a lower rate than developed property. So, the brunt of the district’s financial burden rests squarely on the shoulders of homeowners, who have been reluctant to support a tax hike.
Today, Crete-Monee, a district of 4,200 students, carries $37 million in debt and, until recently, faced a $2.7 million deficit for the 1998-99 school year. In December, the school board announced it was considering shuttering two elementary schools to close that budget gap.
It was this suggestion that planted the seeds of parental discontent. Within weeks, outraged parents packed school board meetings and demanded administrators keep their neighborhood schools open.
The board agreed and, instead, began hacking away at programs and teaching positions. They sliced 60 staff positions, increased class sizes to 32, eliminated some art, music, physical education and foreign language programs and increased student fees by as much as 200 percent.
Those draconian measures lit a fire under an already simmering movement.
“It came as a surprise to us that they would effectively destroy the schools to fix the budget,” said Van Ort, who led the fight to keep Talala Elementary School open. “We feel their No. 1 job is to provide a quality education for our kids, not balance the budget. But we knew that as a community, we had to be courageous enough to do the things other school districts are not doing.”
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With the assistance of school administrators, parents launched a three-prong attack: They looked to legislators; they looked to businesses; and they looked to themselves.
So far, the legislative wing of the Community Action Team has garnered an audience with the most powerful state legislators. By flooding House and Senate leaders with faxes, letters and phone calls, the group has pressured legislators to consider offering grant money to Crete-Monee and other cash-strapped schools.
The fundraising division has raised tens of thousands of dollars by selling lollipops, staging concerts and coaxing money from business and municipal leaders. They also are applying for national grants and investigating a lucrative exclusive soda contract.
In the works are efforts to organize a group of volunteers, including senior citizens and business leaders, who will share their time and talents with schoolchildren and the development of a wide-scale business partnership.
“We intend, as a community, to get ourselves out of debt and get back on the right track financially,” said Turay, who heads the legislative team. “We didn’t get into this situation all by ourselves, but we’ll work 24 hours a day to get ourselves out. We know it’s our responsibility now.”
Jayne Mathews, district spokesperson, said the Crete-Monee Community Action Team’s efforts have reached far beyond the schools.
“It wasn’t until this budget crisis came to a head that the people in these communities really pulled together as one,” Mathews said. “People saw this as vital to the health of the entire community, not just the neighborhood school down the street or the specific program they cared about. It’s amazing what a community’s spirit can do.”