Ten years ago, Lincoln-Way High School District 210 was the envy of school districts through much of the state. Flush with money, its students performed well above state averages on standardized tests, and the growing district was considered a model of financial efficiency.
Now, District 210 is on the state’s financial watch list that’s usually reserved for school districts in some of the poorest areas of Illinois.
On Thursday night, the school board is expected to vote to close one of its four high schools as of the 2016-17 school year — generating an outpouring of anger and disbelief among parents, many of whom feel no one has adequately explained how millions of dollars have been spent.
Just about everyone involved, from school board members to parents and area mayors, points at a key decision in 2006 when the district held a referendum on building two more schools by selling more than $200 million in bonds. Voters in Frankfort, New Lenox, Mokena and portions of Tinley Park and Orland Park overwhelmingly approved the ballot measure, with about 60 percent checking the box marked “Yes.”
District 210 officials promised residents that their property tax bills would not increase as a result of the bond issue because the district would refund parts of its existing debt and restructure its new debt payments to retain the same tax rate. And building two schools, instead of one at that point, would save the district as much as $29 million in inflated construction costs in the future, officials said.
Population projections by regional planners clearly showed that Will County would continue to be one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation over the next three decades — with New Lenox alone booming to about 100,000 residents by 2030, making it on one of the largest municipalities in the state.
But the Great Recession began in December 2007 and would continue full bore through 2009 — killing housing construction, decimating home values, costing thousands of people their jobs and destroying plans for commercial growth throughout the country.
In hindsight, people wonder why District 210 didn’t at least scale back its plans for growth, constructing just one school instead of two. Lincoln-Way North in Frankfort Township opened in 2008 followed a year later by Lincoln-Way West in New Lenox Township.
Those schools would never match the enrollment of the two older schools — Lincoln-Way Central, built in the early 1950s, and Lincoln-Way East, which opened in 1977 as a freshmen-sophomore campus and became a four-year school in the fall of 2001. Projected to handle a population of about 10,000 students, the four schools’ enrollment stalled out at about 7,000.
The lower enrollment meant less money from the state, which sends school districts a certain amount of money for every student. For years, District 210 was apparently spending more than it was getting in tax revenue, despite making cuts in administrative staff and other expenses.
It has a budget deficit of about $5.5 million heading into the new school year, and by June 30 it will have exhausted all of its financial reserves, a situation that caused the state to place the district on its financial watch list.
In May, rumors began to circulate that the district planned to close Lincoln-Way North, 199th Street and Harlem Avenue, but school board members at the time ridiculed residents, suggesting that it was nothing more than idle gossip and the board was months away from even considering such a drastic move.
Ann Jenkins is a Mokena resident who launched a Facebook campaign to try to save Lincoln-Way North and that has more than 2,000 followers. She believes school board members have failed to keep community residents properly informed, may have mismanaged millions of dollars in bond revenue and are making decisions about school closings that are motivated more by political factors than facts.
“We’ve always felt as though we’ve been treated like second-class citizens here in Mokena, and whenever they make changes in attendance boundaries or open schools or, now, plan on closing schools, our children get sent all over the place,” Jenkins said. “We feel they’re going to close Lincoln-Way North, and it just doesn’t make sense.
“This is one of the newest schools, but they’re going to keep a 60-year-old school, Lincoln-Way Central, open and put even more money into it down the road to maintain it. Lincoln-Way West, the other new school, serves the New Lenox area. So does Lincoln-Way Central. So they’re going to keep two schools open in that area although the population base is here now.”
Jenkins claims that the District 210 board has failed to be vigilant about spending, pointing to water bills at Lincoln-Way Central that she contends exceed $200,000 a year, while water bills at each of the other three schools run about $20,000.
“Now they say there was a water leak they discovered and repaired over the summer,” she said. “But didn’t those costs, which were running 10 times higher than at the other schools, raise concerns earlier? Parents have been pouring over the financial records and finding all sorts of things like that, things that don’t make sense, and no one is able to explain them.”
Lawrence Wyllie was District 210 superintendent for more than 20 years, retiring in 2013. One of the highest-paid school officials in Illinois near the end of his career, with a salary in excess of $250,000, he was widely regarded as something of a financial wizard and wasn’t reluctant to tout his success when asked.
I once talked to him about the district’s reluctance to join a statewide campaign to increase school funding, and he suggested that officials from financially challenged suburban districts visit District 210 to learn how to run a cost-efficient school system and raise student test scores at the same time. Wyllie said his district didn’t need any more money from the state and wouldn’t be joining the cause of neighboring districts that were in worse financial shape.
When nearby Consolidated High School District 230 experienced massive cost overruns on expansion projects at its three high schools (Sandburg, Stagg and Andrew) during the past decade, Wyllie boasted that the two new schools his district built around the same time had come in under budget.
But there were always allegations that Wyllie didn’t tolerate dissent on his school board and controlled the district with an iron fist.
One of District 210’s recent school board presidents, Arvid Johnson, was dean of the Brennan School of Business at Dominican University, had a bachelor’s degree in physics from Lewis University, a master’s in electrical engineering from Northeastern University and an MBA from the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina. He earned his doctorate in management science from the Illinois Institute of Technology.
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I mention those academic credentials to point out that the District 210 board is not your usual group in a working-class community, volunteering their time and discovering that they’re overwhelmed by the complexity of public school financing.
The fact that District 210 encompasses a property-rich area and has a highly educated population to draw on for advice and oversight makes its current financial chaos even more surprising.
One longtime observer of the political scene suggested that the district was probably forced by circumstances to build one school too many.
“If the district had only placed a referendum for a new school in the western part of the district on the ballot, it would never have passed,” he said. “So it had to build another school, Lincoln-Way North, to get enough votes to support the bond issue. The other school may have eventually been needed, but it probably could have waited a few years. But you would never get votes to support either one alone in a referendum.”
District 230 encountered the same kind of problem around the same time when it proposed expanding one of the schools based on population studies. Residents demanded that all three schools be enlarged, and that’s how the projects were approved via referendum.
As the District 210 board prepares to vote Thursday night, rumors are now abounding in the community that two schools may have to close to overcome the financial problems. Attendance boundaries would have to be altered.
Parents are not happy and with good reason. There’s been no reasonable explanation for how one of the wealthier and more academically strong school districts in Illinois suddenly has found itself on the state’s financial watch list.
Someone should have seen this coming. No one apparently did.