Calculating the real costs of District 300's cuts

Community Unit District 300 school board President Joe Stevens warned me to get to Monday's board meeting early.

It's a good thing I followed his advice. The Carpentersville Middle School auditorium was almost completely filled with parents and teachers, many of them hoping to persuade the board to save their favorite program.

Many of the people in the audience were there because of proposals to slash the district's transportation costs by $1.6 million, including eliminating busing for preschool, the dual language program and the Elgin Community College partnership.

One of the groups represented Monday was the deLacey Family Education Center, the Carpentersville school for at-risk and special-needs preschoolers.

Stevens addressed a rumor about the school, one I hadn't heard before.

"There has been no discussion of closing deLacey," Stevens said. "That doesn't mean it won't be discussed at some time in the future."

Stevens didn't mention that top district officials have said closing deLacey is a very real possibility if the state dramatically slashes funding for education.

But for now, deLacey itself is not on the table - only the buses that take students to the school and other programs in the district.

The board spent much of Monday's meeting poring over the transportation cost of various programs. Some of the numbers were staggering.

For example, Transportation Director Donna Bordsen estimated it costs the district $6,200 per student to bus kids to the Preschool for All program at Wright Elementary School in Hampshire every year - way above the cost for other schools.

Similarly, Bordsen said it costs the district more than $4,300 per student to bus Dundee-Crown High School students from the Carpentersville school to ECC.

Some of the costs, however, were more about volume than per-student cost. For example, Bordsen reckoned it cost the district about $1,540 per student to bus students to parochial schools each year.

While that's not much, it adds up when several hundred kids use the service - versus the 25 Dundee-Crown kids who catch a ride to ECC.

When board members decide which of the transportation reductions to support, they will no doubt consider that the cuts could devastate the programs themselves.

What they also must also look at, as some board members pointed out Monday, are the costs the district would incur if a large number of students from some of the programs, particularly those who attend parochial schools, were to enroll in regular district schools.

In that case, the district would have to pay not only the cost of transporting the kids, but also the much higher cost of actually educating them.

As Stevens asked at one point on Monday, "If we made these cuts, what would the general education cost go up by?"

• Jameel Naqvi covers the village of Huntley and school districts 158 and 300. E-mail him at jnaqvi@dailyherald.com.