THE JOURNAL & TOPICS NEWSPAPERS | WEEK OF DECEMBER 31, 2006
Ups, Downs Of School Year In Glenview
By JOHN CRAWFORD
It was a good year and a bad year for Glenview's schools.
The bad news was the handling of High School District 225's need for additional funds to operate Glenbrook South and Glenbrook North. No need to rehash the arguments pro and con for the Board's reasons for seeking $95 million in a bond referendum, instead of a more modest sum which would not have drawn such broad condemnation. It is sufficient to point out that several former 225 Board members said that sum was not needed, as well as the local press and a responsible group of local citizens who monitor school board matters. The reaction of the school board, the staff and their supporters to the criticism of the Committee Organized to Save the Tax Cap (COST) was to ignore their analysis, put out only one-sided information to support the Board's proposal, and to push the envelope or even, in the opinion of some COST members, go beyond the statutory restrictions on what they could do to support the referendum. The Board members' position that they had the advice of counsel that nothing they were doing was illegal is unpersuasive; the Illinois Supreme Court and Appellate Court Reports are full of decisions in which the losing parties had been assured by their lawyers that everything they did was legally unassailable. In any event, the citizens of District 225 deserve better. District 225 prides itself on its Character Counts program, teaching the students the importance of the Six Pillars of Character---Trustworthiness, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, Caring and Citizenship. The actions of the Board, some of their staff and their supporters undermined these Pillars in their conduct of the referendum. Especially reprehensible was their denigration of the COST group as representing "nobody but themselves" in a postcard delivered to voters on the Saturday before the November election. The "no" votes of over 49% of the voters in a campaign in which the education establishment did what they did to put this across, over the limited and underfunded campaign of the COST group, is evidence that some taxpayers of District 225 have no confidence in their Board. It is my opinion that Larry Miller, the leader of the COST group, should be nominated as Glenview's Citizen of the Year 2006.
As for the good news, Sister Stephanie Blaszczynski, C.R., a 1951 graduate of Our Lady of Perpetual Help School, left on Dec. 29 to open a boarding school for girls in Tanzania, on the east coast of Africa. Sr. Stephanie lived across from the Redemptorist Retreat House on Milwaukee Avenue and took a bus to OLPH. She joined the Congregation of the Resurrection after graduating from Resurrection High School on the northwest side of Chicago, and just finished serving as President of that school. Her religious order came to Chicago about 100 years ago from Poland. The order recently decided to open a school in Tanzania as part of its mission. Two Resurrection nuns from Poland will accompany her. They will be studying Swahili until May, and hope to have the school built and open by 2008. The area chosen for the school is so remote that they have electricity only two days per week. Her 22-hour, 9,132-mile flight to Africa reminds me of the trip Mother Theodore Guerin made from France to the desolate woods near Terre Haute, Indiana, about 150 years ago, to start a girls' school now known as St. Mary of the Woods College. Mother Theodore was canonized in Rome as a Saint of the Catholic Church on October 15, 2006.
The Glenbrooks, too, have had some outstanding graduates. They must have developed character as a result of the good example of their teachers, untouched by the problems of the Board members now in charge. Let's not give up hope.