An Elgin U46 school board member is questioning whether it’s fair to charge enrollment fees to the same people who pay taxes to the local school district.
Jeanette Ward, who was elected to the Elgin School District U46 Board of Education last spring on a policy of fiscal belt-tightening, raised the issue this month during a meeting of the U46 board.
“Parents share their frustration about paying so much in taxes and then also being asked to pay these registration fees,” Ward said as the board members were talking with Chief Operating Officer Jeff King about the proposed new U46 budget. “It’s hard to know how to answer them.”
King said the original idea of charging what U46 calls an “instructional materials fee,” was to help defray some of the cost of buying books and technological devices for each student. King likened the fee to “tuition” for students. The fees are waived for those whose families meet certain low-income guidelines.
Under state law, students whose families have an income low enough to qualify for the free or reduced lunch program are excused from paying for basic registration and materials fees.
The fees range from $240 a year for U46 high school students and $48 for a half-day kindergartner. But the amount of money collected doesn’t go far, King said.
“We’ve been spending $3 million a year just to replace lost and damaged books,” he said. The fees, by comparison, bring in just $2.1 million a year. The other $900,000, plus the entire cost of buying new books and online resources, must come from taxes and grants.
Ward asked if it would be more fair to make a child who loses or damages a book pay to replace it.
“There is something for that in place,” King said. “That’s at the principal’s discretion.”
Registration fees also were debated in Burlington Central District 301 this year when its school board voted to raise registration fees (their equivalent of U46’s materials fees) by $25 for students in grades K-8 and by $30 for students at Central High School. The District 301 board also agreed to start charging elementary students a $50 annual technology fee and to raise older students’ technology fee from $36 to $50.
“The increase in fees will be used to directly support the purchase of student devices to promote technology use in the classroom and 1:1 computing,” says an explanation of the changes on the District 301 website.
By comparison, District U46 CEO Tony Sanders said this week that even with similar fees, he doesn’t foresee U46 being able to afford having one computer or tablet for every student in the near future, as District 301’s “1:1” policy is aiming for. However, U46 did recently adopt a plan to buy thousands of computers and tablets every year.
Sanders told Ward that every year when U46 administrators recommend how high to set the materials fee, they look at how much other nearby school districts are charging and try to make the U46 cost lower than or equal to others.
That seems to be pretty much true, depending on which fees one counts.
Take a typical high school student who doesn’t sign up for any special programs or sports. In U46 he would have to pay a $240 materials fee if it was paid on time. Someone who lives on Elgin’s far West Side and attends District 301’s Central High would pay the same amount.
Students who attend Dundee-Crown, Hampshire or Jacobs high schools in Community Unit District 300, pay $215 — a $160 registration fee plus $21 for physical education uniform and lock and $34 for iPad insurance.
All three districts charge less for elementary students than for middle schools, and less for middle-schoolers than for high-schoolers. A fifth-grader in U46 would pay a $116 materials fee compared to $170 for registration and technology in District 301 or $130 for registration in District 300.
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Of course, adding in optional activities and perks can blow up all these total costs up drastically.
In U46, a student who attends one of the academies, goes out for football and two other sports and buys health and dental insurance, takes driver education, requires a space in the school parking lot, and buys a yearbook would pay $2,112.
The other two districts add on similarly for special activities, insurance and sports.