At an April 18 special meeting, the District 200 School Board authorized another attempt to sell the Hubble/Wheaton Central property.  After finding no takers at its earlier sealed bid auction, which required a minimum $10 million bid, it will now hold an open public auction with a minimum bid of $5 million.  However, the interest of potential buyers may be clouded by the District’s ever-changing statistics relating to the building.   At best, the District has carelessly publicized numbers without proper research.  At worst, the District’s numbers appear to be derived based on the Board’s …

Look at the neighbor to the right of you, to the left of you, behind you, and across the street.  Including your own household, odds are only one of you will vote in Tuesday’s municipal elections. If you’re happy—or not happy—with local governments, what are you going to do about it? Voter turnout in the last “off year” election, in 2009, was only 18 percent. That’s a shame, because this is our opportunity to select the leadership for our City, Park District, School District, and College of DuPage.  The people who are elected will make important decisions that affect our community’s character…

Themes of transparency and accountability have been prominent in the April 5 school board election campaign, including in a local newspaper’s endorsements. Though all candidates now say transparency is their goal, that hasn’t always been the case in District 200. Over the last couple years, the two biggest transparency issues have been former Superintendent Gary Catalini's contract controversy - in which I was personally involved - and the dismissal of Superintendent Richard Drury. For those who haven’t followed these stories from the beginning, I thought a short refresher might be helpful. …

Are consolidated school districts more efficient?  Governor Quinn wants to force consolidation as part of his state budget proposal.  But let’s not rush into it.  I view Quinn’s school district merger plan like many corporate mergers.  They often promise significant cost savings in the short term, through mass layoffs of redundant personnel.  But they add value only if accompanied by real changes and innovations.  Otherwise, once the layoffs are complete, there are no more easy cost savings to be gained and the combined entity may not be any better off.    Let’s focus instead on the actual …

Prepare your sealed envelopes. To no one’s great surprise, at the Feb. 16 special meeting, the District 200 school board unanimously supported selling the Hubble property by a sealed bid auction. The board says it is “keeping its promises.” District staff also distributed a chronology of events relevant to the Hubble site. But they missed a few, which appear at the end of this article for your information. After all, those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. See if the board’s actions have been consistent with its current talking points. But first, the present and near …

The Wheaton Park District provided some much needed leadership for our community when it proposed to buy the Hubble/Wheaton Central school site in downtown Wheaton.  As recently reported on Patch, the Park District wants to buy the site from District 200 for market value, to preserve the open space and recreational facilities used by thousands of our neighbors.    I support the park district plan, but I also encourage District 200 to show real vision to take a good idea and make it even better.  We don’t need more consultants or giveaways to developers.  We don’t want a big box store or …

Your next paycheck will be lighter after the recent last minute Illinois income tax increase. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that the money will flow to District 200 for the amounts the State has already promised. But while the State’s unpaid obligations to District 200 keep piling up, so do the unpaid obligations of school districts to the State—in the form of pension liability. Without spending reform—including an end to school districts’ unfunded mandates TO the State in the form of retirement salary bumps—no tax increase will ever be enough to dig Illinois out of our budget hole.  …

In the real world, we constantly strive for more and better information to help us make decisions. Yet, the District 200 school board appears anxious to provide students, their parents, and prospective colleges with less information. The board is considering a misguided proposal to eliminate reporting of the class rank students earn, providing colleges and others with less information about actual student academic achievement.  It's hard to see how District 200 can claim to inspire excellence if they're afraid to measure it. This aversion to ranking achievement is unfortunately all too common…

At District 200 high schools, it is both the best of times and the worst of times, to paraphrase Charles Dickens. Recently issued Illinois State Report Cards (available online by searching at http://iirc.niu.edu/Default.aspx) show District 200 students' scores on the widely-used ACT college entrance exam reached an all-time high of 24.4 for the class of 2010.  These scores beat the previous record, 24.2, set in 2000 at a time when a much smaller percentage of students took the test.  Yet both Wheaton North and Wheaton Warrenville South high schools failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP…

Community Unit School District 200 recently honored 15 high school students who qualified as National Merit Scholar Semifinalists. Out of approximately 1.5 million high school juniors who took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test ("PSAT") nationwide, only the top 16,000 qualified for this elite group. Each Semifinalist, who attended the Nov. 10 Board meeting with his or her parents, was honored. Let's stop there. Notice anything special or unusual about this story so far?  The basic facts were reported on Patch On the surface, one observation would be that girls seem…

Did you see the latest presentation on District 200 student test scores? Most likely, no, unless you were one of just five community members in the audience for the district's Oct. 28 Board meeting, the first in its new "workshop" format.  If you missed it, you're out of luck–the presentation, like "the revolution" (to quote a counterculture slogan), will not be televised. Student achievement, and how to improve it, is the most important educational issue a school board tackles. Assistant Supt. Dr. Margo Sorrick delivered a detailed and informative presentation. Luckily, reporters were in the…

A number of people have asked me: Is District 200 really going to raise property taxes nearly 10 percent next year? Or, will our property tax bills actually decline, due to falling property values?  The answer to both questions is "No," but some explanation is required. Well over 100 people in attendance at the school board meeting last Wednesday, Oct. 13 at Hawthorne Elementary got some answers as the school board approved the posting of its 2010 property tax levy. This is the first step in determining what our property tax bills will be next year.  The IRS defines a levy as a legal seizure …

Is there a dime's worth of difference among the gubernatorial candidates?  For Wheaton's Community Unit School District 200 and many other Illinois school districts, the outcome of November's elections may affect tens of millions of dimes they're already owed—and more dimes that have been promised for the future. On Sept. 30, District 200 Superintendent Dr. Brian Harris and superintendents from large unit districts around the state heard differing visions firsthand at the Large Unit District Association (LUDA) Conference in Chicago. LUDA represents the state's 50 largest unit districts, …