Sometimes an idea is so obvious you wonder why it has never been voiced. And then you remember. And you know instantly that it will never happen.
So it was last week when, in more or less a toss-off, we posted an item from last week’s meeting of the OPRF District 200 school board. Sharon Patchak-Layman is a very rare veteran of both the elementary and the high school boards. She suggested that, since District 97 was looking for new headquarters space and the high school is about to undertake a master planning process for its million-square-foot building, the two entities talk about sharing space at the high school.
The presumed kissing cousins in the current rush toward intergovernmental collaboration have been D97 and the park district. We’d all been led to think that the shared headquarters space would be within the current park district headquarters on Madison Street. Now the two sides are exploring the absurd notion of spending $6-10 million on a new building behind village hall while abandoning their current sites on Madison with fantasies that anyone would want to buy them.
While the park district and the schools — at both an elected and appointed level — get along swell and could make a shared space work, the logical combination is Patchak-Layman’s idea of putting the headquarters of the two school districts under one massive roof over on Scoville Avenue.
One of Oak Park’s greatest challenges is the racial achievement gap at the high school. That would be the same gap that starts in middle school, elementary school, kindergarten. Another chronic problem is the tangible disconnect between these two districts. Over the decades, there have been long periods when the superintendents didn’t get along and so they seldom talked. The school boards have initiated perfunctory shared meetings every so often but the collaboration is negligible. High school teachers complain that D97 students are poorly prepared for the OPRF curriculum. Elementary teachers gripe that the school is not open to its placement recommendations.
Put all the top school officials in one building, allow them to share a lunchroom and a conference room, layer in clearer expectations of data-sharing on test scores and discipline, and we would be poised for progress.
But the reality is that the bad history, the inevitable egos and a sense that D97 would be subsumed within OPRF’s hallways will make this a non-starter.
Doesn’t mean it’s not a strong idea.