Parents Frustrated With Elmhurst Park District

ELMHURST, IL – Elmhurst Park District is working to solve problems with its online registration system, which is the source of parents’ frustrations.

Four days ago, resident Nora Baxtrom created a Change.org petition to call for the district to make changes to the system. On Saturday morning, the troubles included pages not loading, significant waitlists and a cumbersome process for new families, her petition says.

The petition also says parents are frustrated that registration accessibility is limited to those who are at a computer at 8 a.m. on a specific Saturday.

“While the Elmhurst Park District has stated for multiple years that the program vendor is an issue, it is time that the Board of Commissioners is held directly accountable for the process,” Baxtrom’s petition says.

As of Wednesday, 221 people had signed the petition.

In a statement Wednesday, the park district apologized for the system’s problems, saying parents were understandably angry and upset.

The problems made it clear that the district’s registration software is not meeting local needs, the district said. It also was apparent that residents are willing to go back to the district’s programs in larger numbers than could have been predicted, according to the statement.

The district also said it does not have enough space to accommodate all the local desires for programming.

For four years, residents have logged into the registration site and signed up for seasonal programs without issue. In 2016, after experiencing software “glitches” with online registrations, the district upgraded its software and increased bandwidth and speed, among other things, it said.

After those changes, the district said, 14 registration efforts happened without problems, the district said. Residents found the site was operating slowly or not at all, the district said.

“While this didn’t ultimately keep residents from registering – as more than 6,200 registrations across 1,300 households were completed in approximately 90 minutes – troubleshooting of the issue began immediately,” the district said.

Part of the problem was presumably because of an outage Comcast reported in the area, according to the statement. The district said it is looking at changing software vendors.

Reports showed the transactions increased 61 percent over previous pre-pandemic spring registration numbers, totaling 6,500 within the first 24 hours, the district said. The number of households registering rose 25 percent.

Meanwhile, the waitlist jumped to 3,460, compared to an average of 300 in most years, according to the statement.

“Last fall, our registration numbers were some of the highest in the previous five years, and there were no issues with the software,” Jim Rogers, the district’s executive director, said in the statement. “But this kind of increase was not something anyone could’ve reasonably predicted.”

The district said it is “very limited” in its space for programming because of its inadequate, decades-old facilities.

“The Elmhurst Park District only receives a nickel for every dollar in taxes, and our tax rate is the third lowest of all DuPage County park districts,” Rogers said. “We wish we were able to provide bigger, better facilities and to offer more programming, but unfortunately, the reality is that at this point in time, we can only operate within our current financial limitations and space constraints.”

In 2016, residents made it clear they wanted newer, bigger facilities to meet local needs, according to the statement. But residents were unwilling to support a referendum to increase taxes that would have paid for such improvements, the district said.

When the pandemic in 2020 hit, the district ended talk of a referendum of any size.