OPRF enrollment spike could cost $20 million

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Updated: February 27, 2012 8:33AM

Enrollment at Oak Park-River Forest High School is predicted to spike by almost 700 students in the next decade.

If enrollment soars as projected, an advisory panel said, the district will need $20 million more to meet related expenses, including hiring 40 new teachers.

The District 200 School Board on Jan. 19 unanimously accepted a new enrollment report that projects a spike of up to 680 students over the next 10 years.

But board members differed sharply on how to address those increased costs and looming deficit budgets.

Since October, controlling the district’s rising expenditures has been the focus of an Advisory Leadership Team headed by Superintendent Steven Isoye. The team includes Chief Financial Officer Cheryl Whitham, faculty members and administrators, and three community members.

The school board heard a presentation from the advisory team featuring recommendations on how to save $24 million over the next 10 years. By a 5-2 vote the board adopted those recommendations and incorporated them into the 2013 budget planning process. Board members Ralph Lee and Sharon Paychak-Layman voted no.

The high school is currently sitting on a $105 million surplus. It is taking in more money than it spends, but that will soon change, officials said. The annual budget will fall into deficit status in 2014, and the surplus will decrease to $45 million in 2022, with $10 million more in annual expenses than incoming revenues, school officials said.

The savings plan urged by the advisory leadership team would delay the onset of deficit spending nearly two years into 2016. After 2022, the board acknowledged, it will be forced to go to referendum for a tax hike.

“The critical step is to get started now, and begin a process of continuous review and of improvement on how the district manages its expenditures,” advisory team member Paul Carbery, a general partner in a private equity firm, told the school board.

“You can’t have a sustainable business model where your expenses exceed your revenues every year,” said advisory team member Paige Rogers, the chief financial officer of a private investment firm.

Witham noted that the school district’s revenue stream is not like a private business, saying, “We will not see increased revenues based on additional students.”

“Do we project that we’ll never live within our means?” Lee asked.

That situation was not of the school district’s making, others replied.

“That’s the way the state designed it,” said board member Amy McCormack. “We’re living with a faulty (revenue) structure provided by the state.”

“We are trapped here, because of the legislation that requires us periodically to have to turn back to our taxpayers (via referendum),” said District 200 Board President Dee Millard.

Board member John Phelan pointed out that the primary alternative means of matching expenditures with revenue ”is to cannibalize our programs.”

Cutting health care and the resulting loss of some teachers, Phelan said, would “essentially undermine the quality education we’ve been elected to provide.”

Board member Terry Finnegan said while he agreed with Lee’s concern regarding district spending, he disagreed with his conclusions.

“I applaud your doggedness in pointing that out, if that is your goal,” Finnegan said. “(But) without this sort of effort, we don’t stand a chance.”

As she did with the district enrollment report, Paychak-Layman questioned whether the metrics used to justify the advisory leadership team’s recommendations were accurate.

Witham said they were.

“We’ve reviewed all these assumptions,” she said. She then went over the numbers in detail for the board.

Isoye called the budgetary projections “an evolving process.”

“These are projection models based on trends,” he said. “The idea was not to come up with a perfect model. The idea was to come up with a better model and revisit it on an annual basis.”

Isoye said that same approach will be followed with the enrollment projections, which the advisory leadership team will monitor closely. A follow-up enrollment study will be conducted in three years.

“This is not going to be a static model. We will make recommendations to tweak it,” Isoye said. “If over time we’re seeing our projections are off, that is when the board should be questioning us.”

Lee argued that the responsibilities of the advisory committee was different from the school board. He said the school district was not immune to the effects of the poor economy.

“Sometimes things have to be done that actually are painful,” Lee said. “If the average taxpayer experiences pain over the long run, it seems to me that the school district should also necessarily experience pain over the long run.”

Not if that pain hurt educational quality, others said.

“I don’t believe the community will accept us lessening the quality of education for our children,” said McCormack. “When push comes to shove, this community supports education.”

“We’re taking reasonable steps to assure we’re spending the right amount of money on quality education,” said Phelan. “The (advisory committee) can assure we have gas in the car. We’ve got to steer it in the right direction.”