Earlier today, I sat in my classroom at Roosevelt Middle School, watching sixth-grade Humanities students prepare to give presentations on Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Words buzzed around like faeries in the night air of an enchanted Athenian wood. Students discussed Puck, Hermia, Lysander, the Globe Theater and Elizabethan costumes. "The course of true love never did run smooth," muttered one child.
"That’s a cool way of saying, ‘love is hard,’" supplied his work partner.
Maintaining a good school system is hard, too. Students in the District 90 Academically Talented Program (ATP) courses study the works of Shakespeare, Hemingway, Homer, and Steinbeck. They learn to debate, to write, to develop and argue a thesis with the tenacity and energy of junior-sized courtroom attorneys. They impress us (and they impress the people buying homes in River Forest) with dazzling test scores and scholastic contest wins. To keep our advanced pupils challenged and productive, everyone must work together. Teachers must design and implement inspiring curricula. Parents must nurture and set limits. Voters must pass the March 21 referendum.
People ask, "What is at stake here?" The answer is simple and a little scary. If the referendum fails, the school board will be forced to cut 21 teaching positions. Our school finances are challenged by many factors, including rising enrollment, state-mandated programs, and tax caps which limit the money that our district can receive from property tax revenues. Cutting the teaching staff would balance the budget, but at a staggering cost to the integrity of our school programs. There would be no ATP math, ATP humanities, music, clubs, art or foreign language. The average class size would rise to an astonishing 35 pupils. There would be no more Shakespeare and students would go back to thinking that Homer is just the donut-eating antihero of The Simpsons.
Also at risk are some critical intangibles, things like morale and the outstanding culture of achievement that we have worked so hard to create. To demonstrate my point, I invite the voters of River Forest to eat lunch with me. No, we are not going to Panera on taxpayers’ money. Instead, you can share my cheese sandwich and watch the kids who eat lunch in Room 250. Usually, there are about 20 students present. A few are goofing off, but most are discussing Shakespeare or The Iliad or working difficult math problems on the board (I mean really hard problems, like graphing feasible regions for businesses and using the Factor Theorem to pull apart complex polynomials).
Nobody is forcing these kids to be here. They are here because they want to do well, because a lot of their friends are here, because in room 250, nobody is going to knock you for doing hard math at lunch. They’re here because, at Roosevelt, it’s cool to be smart.
Puck cries in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, "What fools these mortals be!" Let’s not be foolish. It’s hard to create a living, breathing top-10 school system, but it’s even harder to revive one that has been mortally wounded by the slashing of budgets. Help us maintain the culture of excellence. Go to the polls on March 21 and vote, "yes" for this vital referendum.
