BDR3 'Excessive' And 'Premature': Letter

The following letter was written and submitted by Jeff Hamburg:

The North Shore School District 112 School Board will close four schools, including Lincoln and Ravinia elementary schools, Elm Place Middle School and the early-learning Green Bay school. Those changes (called “BDR3”) take effect for the school year beginning in fall 2017, and come at great expense to students. “BDR” stands for Budget Deficit Reduction. It is a plan to close four schools, increase class size, and layoff over 10% of the teaching staff even though the District’s financial position provides time to come up with a new reconfiguration plan.

The Board’s decision to close four schools by next year is both excessive and premature. The Board purports to resolve a budget deficit through its action, but claims of a deficit this year are misleading and may prove false. The District characterizes its budget with the assumption it will spend all of the money currently budgeted for capital projects. Frequently, however, the District has over-budgeted for capital expenditures, which tend not to get done as planned. In other words, 112 has repeatedly “banked” funds meant for repair, building a large cash hoard in the process.

This routine practice explains why the District’s surplus has grown by leaps and bounds ($27 million in 2013 to more than $44 million in 2016). Bear in mind, the Board is authorized to use surplus funds at its discretion. In fact, Board member Karla Livney contended in an October 18, 2016 Chicago Tribune article that savings from school closings could be applied to build a (wait for it) single-middle-school campus.

Let us imagine that the District actually spends the money intended for building maintenance and repairs as planned. This would result in a very small deficit for the year. The District’s finances would remain in top shape through the April 4, 2017 school board election and beyond, allowing a new Board with wide community support to implement a reasonable reconfiguration.

The election offers hope, but we could move beyond BDR3 now if only the Board would work with the superintendent’s specially-formed Reconfiguration 2.0 Committee. This group, consisting of 31 capable and dedicated citizens, has developed multiple preliminary alternatives to BDR3, offering different paths to financial sustainability without BDR3’s drastic disruptions to students and schools. The current Board, however, has refused to entertain these options.

The current School Board has largely created the ballooned maintenance requirements facing the District and the looming deficits by deferring repairs and draining money budgeted for capital projects into the surplus fund. But in the board’s contrived crisis, we also find the remedy; the bloated surplus gives the community time to elect a new Board to responsibly manage and lead.