An Oak Park Elementary District 97 official compared what would happen financially to the district if two referendums on the ballot this spring ultimately fail to pass to a plane crash at a recent board meeting.
The district’s elected officials plan to present a detailed list of cuts to programming and staffing in addition to planned capital projects if the two ballot questions do not receive voter approval in April at a meeting slated for Feb. 14.
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Voters in District 97 will be asked on April 4 to approve two separate District 97 referendums allowing the district to issue $57.5 million school building bonds and increase the limit on what school officials can request in property tax dollars each year. If voters approve the latter referendum, the district will be able to increase its property tax extension rate by 1 percent, which amounts to approximately $13.3 million in additional revenue. Property owners with a yearly property tax bill of $10,000 would see their tax payment rise by $740, or $74 per every $1,000 they currently pay, according to a district presentation.
“I think what happens in the event of failure immediately after election day is power is cut to the engines,” said board member Graham Brisben, comparing a potential failure of the referendums to an airplane crash.
As officials have noted during previous discussions of the referendums, Brisben again reiterated that the primary driver pushing the district to ask taxpayers for more money is a dramatic increase in enrollment over the last decade. According to a district presentation, average daily attendance throughout the district is up by about 24 percent over 2007, which translates to approximately 1,000 additional students. Last fall also marked the first time in four decades that enrollment had surpassed 6,000 students, according to the presentation.
If the referendums don’t pass, Brisben said district officials would need to approve about $4 million in cost-cutting measures at their first board meeting following the election. Those cuts would mean that 26 teaching positions that open up due to retirements this summer would remain unfilled and the district wouldn’t have the means for a proposed addition to Holmes Elementary School, he said.
“In fiscal 2018, that’s when you stop gliding and you actually hit the mountain,” Brisben said. He said the district will need to dig into its reserve funds to make ends meet in its operating budget, which would deplete the amount of money available for any emergency life and safety repairs that may need to be done.
District officials have projected that reserve funds will dip into negative territory by next year without dramatic cuts in services or the approval of a referendum. The operating referendum, if it were to pass, would bring the district’s reserve levels up to 27 percent of its total annual operating budget, according to school officials.
Brisben said the district eventually would still need to make an additional $6 million worth of cuts after the initial $4 million of reductions. The further reductions in spending would necessitate cutting between 70 and 80 staff positions, most of which would be teachers, he said.
He said the financial situation would be so “dire” that “you have to cut into the bone of general curriculum,” which would mean an immediate increase in class sizes leading to classroom populations at least 25 percent larger than the state’s average class size.
Brisben also warned that using debt to fund operating costs, which include staff salaries, supplies and the district’s day-to-day expenses, would “create a structural deficit” that may lead to the school district being placed on a state watch list and “that plays out to eventual state takeover.”
If voters say no to the school building bond referendum, Brisben said the district won’t have the money necessary to move walls and create more classroom capacity at Longfellow and Lincoln elementary schools. Without the ability to construct additions, he said, the district will likely need to put trailers on the playgrounds of those schools to create more classroom space, he said.
Additional details about potential cuts and their repercussions will be presented to the board and the public on Feb. 14, Brisben said.
“We don’t want anyone to have any false illusions there is a just-get-by-we’ll-make-it-work answer here,” he said. “There are no easy answers.”
Lee V. Gaines is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.