View the public comments and noteworthy statements from the 4/21/2022 D158 School Board Meeting below.
2:20: Mother points out that last month, the D158 Parent Union brought tip line comments to the board’s attention regarding the violence and fighting at the high school. Near the end of that board meeting, the board said that they really needed to know who was saying these things in order to take them seriously.
Within a week of that meeting, two large Huntley Facebook groups had more than 200 comments detailing violence at HHS with people’s names attached to them. A week later, the March issue of the Huntley Voice had a student editorial that read “Take us seriously please – students feel unheard by administration,” and it detailed how students have stopped reporting incidents and question the support they can get.
The Parent Union is requesting a strategic session from the board specifically regarding the high school violence.
2:22: Father discusses the 2023 district budget. He looks at previous years’ operating expenses per student and notes that in 2010, they predicted these would go down. In 2017, the budget showed enrollment predictions, but the current budget does not.
He states that enrollment at D158 is dropping, and it has been dropping over the last five years by more than a thousand students. It is predicted to continue to drop due to people moving out of Illinois and homeschooling numbers doubling in the last two years.
The budget states that the board wants an increase of 7.7% more funding. He points out the current inflation and food pricing eating away at everyone’s paychecks, yet they will ask the community for more money.
He also points out that the increase in budget is not going to fund teachers or staff salaries, which we support. In fact, teachers have been cut over the past five years, while administrators have been added, and this is the wrong direction.
“I ask the district and this community to scrutinize the budget. We need to look at how we are spending our money. Does this match the educational priorities of restoring what we lost over the last two years? The data has dropped. We’re not educating our children as well as we used to.”
He also adds that we may not need to buy 13 new buses if enrollment drops by another 1000 students in the next five years, as it previously has. He asks that the budget be scrutinized before another huge tax increase is passed on to this community.
2:27: Mother speaks about special ed services and that the district did not acknowledge World Down Syndrome Day and was told that they instead recognized disabilities in October as part of the “Recognizing American Diversity” committee, but lumping all disabilities together is not the preferred way to promote inclusion, especially among the autistic student community too.
The district did not acknowledge Autism Awareness Month for April either, and with 1200 students in the district on IEPs, a push for inclusion would have acknowledged them too. She would like to see the district educating the student population on the special needs of these groups to help reduce stigma.