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Health & Fitness

The District 113 Referendum Through the Eyes of a Student

Before you head to the polls on April 9th, read what a current student at HPHS has to say about the District 113 referendum.

As I started typing this, I tried to keep a little mental note at the front of my mind telling me to keep it short and sweet, since as many friends of mine will attest, I like to talk.  No, scratch that.  I LOVE to talk.  Anyway, this is the first time I’ve written something like this.  So here it goes.

As the April 9th election rolls around the corner, we’ve all seen many arguments both in support of the referendum as well as against it over the past few months.  Both sides have their talking points, their 30-second pitches, their campaign techniques, and many other components of their campaign down to a sort of robotic, refined art form.  Watching a campaign operate is like watching a grandfather clock tick.  There are lots of complex parts that all work together in a carefully orchestrated symphony, ticking away item by item towards the end goal. 

The problem is that while both sides are very passionate in campaigning for the outcome they’d like, very few of the leaders have the perspective of being a student at either District 113 school in the past few years.  And that perspective, I believe, is what’s most crucial as voters head to the polls in just a few short days.

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I guess I should start out by saying the roofs don't leak all that much.  I say that because if you saw the physical shape the rest of school is in, you’d be surprised you can’t see open sky from your desk in some classrooms.  The classrooms have horrible temperature control, crumbling walls, and very poor layout.  But at least we’re usually not getting soaked every time it rains.  We just get to see what happens after it rains.  Two years ago as I walked into my English class, I noticed a small roped-off area of the classroom with what appeared to be a rather large pile of brown and gray vomit on the floor; I asked my teacher what happened.  “You know how it rained this past weekend?  The roof apparently leaked and part of the ceiling collapsed.”  Hey.  At least we weren’t in the classroom when it happened.  Maybe I should talk about what happened the week after that instead.  As I ran up a flight of stairs in the B building, I was told to head back down the stairs to the other side of the building and use the other set of stairs instead.  One of the custodial staff explained that the weather had warmed up rather quickly over the span of a few weeks and caused the brick exterior of the building to expand.  As the brick expanded, the interior plaster walls did not, and the walls were consequently expelled in large sections onto the stairs, the mildew-smelling mess of which was now being scooped, mopped, and vacuumed up into several garbage cans lined up along the stairs.

Do the schools need $120 million in work?  No.  They need more than that.  That’s why a long-range master plan has been jointly developed by community members and experts, which as far as I know is the first of its kind for District 113.  At HPHS, new locker rooms are needed.  A larger cafeteria is needed.  The student commons need a major overhaul.  The kitchen serving the cafeteria is far too small to adequately serve a school the size of HPHS.  The library needs to be expanded.  These aren’t just my opinions, they’re the opinions of experts who do this for a living.  $120 million is being spent on both schools, and none of the issues I mentioned above are being addressed.  That's a testament to how badly our schools need these renovations and overhauls.  Everything in this plan is essentially what should have been fixed decades ago but wasn't.  Now we need to play catch-up, and we’re learning the hard way that it's painful to shoulder the cost of delaying necessary investments since the costs for repairs will just keep piling up.  It isn’t because the district hasn't maintained equipment.  They’ve done a superb job keeping heating and air conditioning equipment running that’s long outlived its life expectancy, some of which dates from before World War II. 

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We’re living in a century of TV being able to be streamed live to cell phones.   Cars that park themselves, laptops that are thinner than a chocolate chip cookie, and the ability to instantly communicate with someone face-to-face on the other side of the globe.  Society has come a long way in the last century.  Yet two of our gyms and one academic building date back to times when automobiles were a novel concept, with the Model-T being put into production just four years after these buildings were built.  One building has no ventilation, no plumbing, no locker rooms, and holes the size of softballs in the crumbling walls despite hundreds of thousands of dollars that have been invested in fixing it over the past few decades.  In addition, 30-40% mechanical efficiency gains will be seen in new buildings compared to old buildings, according to a D113 PowerPoint slide.  That's not even counting the amount of money that will be saved by no longer needing to invest in crumbling buildings that have been demolished.

Between the late '60s and the late '90s there was almost zero infrastructure investment in our schools.  Facilities were adequately maintained, but nothing was done to address aging, crippled equipment.  Now the time has come where we not only have to upgrade equipment that’s getting old by today’s standards, but now we also are tasked with replacing equipment that should have been replaced over the course of the last 5 decades.  That’s why this plan is so expensive.

In the late ‘90s, Northbrook and Glenview passed a $94 million referendum for Glenbrook North and Glenbrook South.  It created student lounges and work spaces with flat-screen TVs to plug laptops into, larger cafeterias, weight rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows, spacious student commons with work tables and couches with spaces to socialize, and new pools with floor-to-ceiling windows along with field houses for both schools, just to name just a few of the improvements.  We’re looking at a $120 million plan that doesn't create student lounges, doesn't expand the commons, doesn't enlarge the cafeteria, and doesn’t even renovate locker rooms that still have hand-painted signs from the ‘60s above urinals reminding students to flush the toilets after use.  We’re not getting field houses either.  And yet, some members of the community are calling the plans ‘excessive’. 

But why are athletics important?  According to D113, the current athletic wing was built to house 11 sports teams.  Since then, the Highland Park athletics program has grown to include 29 sports.  The average rate of extracurricular athletics participation in the State of Illinois is around 50%.  In District 113, that number is 89%.  That means that on top of all 2100 students that participate in state-mandated P.E. on a daily basis at HPHS, 9 out of every 10 students participate in an extracurricular athletic sport.  And yet, we haven’t touched athletic facilities since the ‘60s.  On college applications, there need to be more than just good test scores and grades to help students gain acceptance to many of the elite schools to which students from D113 apply.  Having a large, successful athletics program not only helps on college resumes, but more importantly teaches many extremely valuable lessons in life; something I can personally attest to, having played football for the Giants for four years. 

Academics are by far the most important component of a high school education.  We’ve ensured that staff-wise, we have the best teachers and coaches.  The teachers have done an amazing job here, especially when you take into account the facilities they've been equipped with.  HPHS and Deerfield are ranked by U.S. News & World Report above neighboring schools such as Glenbrook North, Glenbrook South, Lake Forest, and New Trier.  All of those schools, with the exception of New Trier, have far superior facilities.  I’ve seen them all in person.  It’s time for us to cough up the cash for the one-time investment that we need to bring our schools back to the cutting edge of education, to the days when we produced alumni such as Stansfield Turner, Gary Sinise, John Grunsfeld, and Brian Ross, among many, many others.  They had teachers that shared the same passion and commitment to teaching as our current teachers do; the primary difference was that they had facilities that fostered a productive learning environment.  But when students are late to class due to the distances they need to traverse in a five-minute passing period and then need to wear their jackets in class because the heat in their classroom is broken, it’s tough to focus on learning.

Other schools are focusing on improving the amount of open socialization space and natural light in their smartboard-laden buildings, while we’re still fighting over fixing leaking pipes and replacing chalkboards and buildings built before the Great Depression.  It’s time to turn the page and start a new chapter in the history of D113; a chapter that in 20, 30, 40 years will be looked back upon as the start of a new era in education on the North Shore.

Again, that’s just my two cents.  But as a student at Highland Park High School, I strongly encourage you to VOTE YES on April 9th.

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