Enrollment is on the rise at public elementary schools in Oak Park, and that is good news. Growth in the district reflects confidence in our schools and in our community.
The projections indicate pockets of overcrowding lie ahead and, wisely, the school board and the administration have begun open discussions on what the right approach might be to solve tight space problems. Last week we reported that District 97’s Longfellow and Beye schools will encounter somewhat modest overcrowding by 2017. This week we report that other schools there might also face tight conditions.
The district prudently has its new architectural firm reviewing the projections and scouting each school for opportunities to repurpose space or ultimately to add space.
We admire the broad conceptual tone of these early discussions when all options must be on the table. But we’d offer some counsel and some caution as District 97 considers its plans.
Adding classrooms is remarkably costly. The architects set a cost range on a classroom at $250,000 to $500,000. That’s real money using real tax dollars. Our clear view is that Oak Park has reached and exceeded the point of property tax saturation. There are diminishing returns every time more money must be raised from taxpayers. This is the same reason we doubt the essential need to air-condition D97 classrooms on a retroactive basis.
Another option discussed at the board table to battle overcrowding is to look at the current school boundaries and make adjustments to fine-tune enrollment bumps. We join board member Peter Traczyk in strongly advocating this position. We don’t underestimate the complexity of the judgments such adjustments would necessitate. Neither do we underestimate the emotional ties parents and students happily have with “their school.”
But when we look back over decades to the creation of the two middle schools carved out of what had been a 10-elementary neighborhood school model, we know that it was not the expectation that the new boundaries set at that time were locked down forevermore. In the 1970s, the driving force of the school reorganization was to create and nurture racial diversity in each school. The expectation was that changing percentages of black and white students, and the possible clustering of black and white families in different sections of Oak Park, would require occasional shifts in school boundaries.
Today, happily, our concerns are not racial diversity but simple distribution of a small number of students to allow D97 to maximize the use of its existing facilities. Oak Park and its schools are plenty strong enough to absorb the inevitable concerns some people will express.