One sure way to know where you are in Park Forest is to drive along Monee Road in the south tip of town. For most of its path through the village, the road is smooth and newly paved. The surface ends abruptly near Blackhawk Drive. That’s where the excellent road of Will County meets the old road of Cook County.
If you live in this small area of town that is part of Will County, you often are at odds with your friends to the north. It seems to take longer to go anywhere. You send your property tax payments to Joliet, not Chicago. You need to travel a couple more miles to vote on Election Day and even though you live in Will County, you probably pay most of your sales taxes in another county.
One of the best things you have in this section of town is Talala School, where you can walk your children to school.
Well, times change.
By the start of the 2020 school year, four schools in the area, including Talala, will close. It is part of a huge rearrangement of school buildings and resources by Crete-Monee School District 201-U. Other schools to be shuttered are Coretta Scott King Magnet School in University Park, and in Crete, Balmoral and Crete elementary schools.
The old high school on Exchange Avenue in Crete, now the sixth grade Center, is being torn down to be replaced by a pre-kindergarten to second grade school. Monee Elementary School would be expanded to become a third to fifth grade school. The Crete-Monee Middle School, grades sixth to eighth in University Park, would be enlarged and the Early Learning Center would house the alternative school as well as school offices.
It is called “The Plan,” will cost $84.5 million and is an effort to consolidate the nine-school, 80-square mile district that stretches from the Indiana state line west to Harlem Avenue and from the extension of Steger road on the north to Offner Road to the south.
This time, unlike most school bond issues, voters will not have a say in the matter. All but $2.2 million will be funded by bonds that do not have to be approved by voters in a referendum, which, school officials admit, in all likelihood would fail.
I have been told I need to take off both shoes and socks if I want to count past 10 and the often unfathomable mathematics of school funding rattle my brain, but this is the reason you won’t have the chance to cast your vote in the matter.
In 1994, when voters in the district approved tax caps that limited an increase in property taxes, it did not stop all financing plans for schools, according to 201-U Assistant Supt. Ken Surma. At the same time, the district was allowed to finance bond issues of $2.4 million annually for 20 years. That was the current debt the district had. It is called a Debt Service Extension Base.
In 1999, 201-U voters approved an increase in the extension base to $6.45 million. What this yes vote did was to allow the school district to issue bonds in the amount of $6.45 million annually without having a referendum because they already received the approval of the voters five years before.
Then there is the fine print.
A property tax bill for the district is complicated. I am told it is composed of both a cost of operation and the debt service —the money needed to pay off both the interest and principal. That amount changes each year and is based on the Consumer Price Index.
Under the new facility plan, district officials say homeowners would not see an increase in the district’s debt portion of a property tax bill but the operational portion of the property tax bill is capped to increase by 5 percent or the index, whichever is less. Currently, the index is 2.1 percent, and to finance the facility plan, the district would extend their debt payments out for 20 years.
If homeowners won’t have a sizeable increase in their tax bills, they will still be paying the debt for 20 more years.
There are nearly 5,000 students attending classes in the nine schools in the district. Just the closing of those four schools would mean that hundreds of students would have to take busses to get to their new school.
There are large red-lettered signs “DON’T CLOSE TALALA” on a few of the front yards near the Park Forest school and I am sure there are those in University Park and Crete that feel the same way. Talala is two blocks from our home. It is the place our two children were first educated and where my wife taught for 23 years.
Everything changes over time but the closing of a school changes everything.
