Start time change was a mistake

This letter is for those of you who voted in Miller, Rowden and Keenan to the District 15 school board with a mandate to control costs and stop frivolous spending. Well, guess what? They have not accomplished that and have just done the same thing as their predecessors.

Last April, they helped decide, in a rushed, uninformed decision making process, to change from a four-tiered starting time to a two-tiered starting time system in our school system. The majority of parents were against this but the board passed it by a vote of 7-1. Why was this change made? Not to save money. Not to streamline any processes. This was done in order to please certain parents, namely those in schools that had the 9:10 late start. They were tired of starting so late and they wanted a change.

When the school board instituted the change, a profuse amount of money was spent on re-doing the bus routes by the school district. The transportation department botched the job and now we have school children on our buses for 40 minutes to over an hour. There are additional busing problems beyond this.

This school board has now not only wasted our money changing the bus routes but it is now spending $25,000 of our money for a consultant to fix a problem that never should have existed in the first place. In addition, more money will need to be spent after that to correct the transportation issue.

If the school board cannot handle a simple bus routing problem, it makes me wonder what decisions they are implementing in regards to our children's curriculum, teachers and administration. I personally now cannot trust the school board to make fair, unbiased decisions.

Teri Havansek

Palatine