Measure A failure affects district

The failure to pass Measure A, a parcel tax, has had several effects on the district — including larger class sizes.

In May 2017, the parcel tax landed a community approval rate of 65.83 percent and rejection rate of 34.17 percent. The tax was 0.17 percent away from passing.

“I’m not interested in making a witch-hunt out of it,” Knight said. “We wanted to know why we lost an election by 25 votes that we thought was in the bag. How did that happen? We paid the money and looked at the list and thought, ‘Well, maybe the community didn’t support the school district,’ but the community really had nothing to do with it.”

According to Knight, there were “plenty” of in-district parents who either didn’t vote or didn’t return their ballots in time. Despite the $197 added to community member’s tax bills, Knight said that he doesn’t believe that there was a financial deterrent that might have swayed 1,009 of 2,953 voters to vote against the measure.

“I don’t think that charging people $197 a year out of their $5-6,000 tax bill would have killed anybody in Oak Park, I just don’t buy it,” Knight said. “Especially since all that money is also deductible from your state and income tax. The bottom line is, I don’t know why people didn’t support the $197-a-year parcel tax, except out of laziness or not turning their ballot back in.”

District-wide alterations have already begun to appear as a result of Measure A’s failure. Although staffing cuts were initially predicted, they have not taken place. Teachers who decided to retire were simply not replaced for the following school year.

“Rather than cut any of the programs that we have right now, which require staffing, we decided to increase class sizes by one or two kids per class and that way we could keep everything and kind of spread [the impact] out across the school, rather than go in there with a scalpel and just slice out one program which may or may not give us the kind of return that we’re looking for,” Oak Park High School Principal Kevin Buchanan said.

Additionally, the initial administrative effort to completely cut certain subjects has been counterbalanced and waived as multiple class periods combine into one and grow in sizes. The average class size increased this year to roughly 34.5 students from the original average of approximately 28. Freshman English classes and elective classes have increased in size.

In English teacher Kathleen Bowman’s 32nd year teaching in Oak Park, she said that ninth grade English class sizes “are higher than they have ever been.”

Several teachers expressed their concerns regarding the increased class sizes.

“Members of our department have told me that this has had a tremendous impact on their classes, not only because of the amount of writing we usually do, but also because it takes away from the level [of] intimacy and personal connections in the classroom, which have been so important to our department,” Bowman said.

This increasing of class sizes, Buchanan said, prevents the school from having to make any departmental cuts, which is what the district administration generally wanted to avoid. Buchanan said this may open doors for the opportunity to expand school subject choices.

“We like everything we have and we actually want to do more,” Buchanan said.

Buchanan said the administration creates “greater flexibility in the schedule” through a process known as “creative scheduling.”

Creative scheduling is a method of combining smaller classes in order to save teacher jobs and equalize student enrollment. The utilization of study halls, zero periods and athletic classes are attributed to this method. It is largely used in the foreign language department, and was used in the 2016-17 school year to combine the English III Honors and Advanced Placement classes. When the smaller classes unify, Buchanan said a wider selection of class periods will become available to students who may feel pressured to choose one class over another, and allows teachers to teach a greater range of class subjects.

“We do that based on what registration and class requests look like. That’s not necessarily solely a feature of budget, it’s a feature of scheduling,” Buchanan said. “It’s a giant Rubix cube because, theoretically, you do something over here in art and it’s going to affect physics.”

Buchanan said it was a matter of either stopping kids from taking specific classes, rationing classes by limiting subjects to a specific about of available years — for instance, saying that a student would only be permitted to take three years of math — or combining classes to save money and schedule space.

“We didn’t want to tell kids, ‘You can’t take the class,’” Buchanan said. “We are dealing with a highly motivated, high academic, college-going culture and we want to give the kids every opportunity to take everything they can to be competitive with those selective spots.”

However, there are other strategies in place to counteract the decrease in funding.

The solar power project that began district-wide in March and ended Aug. 2017 is already offsetting financial losses from the parcel tax — specifically the $870,000 yearly loss — by deducting about $360,000 from the school’s electricity bill. Its intended purpose was for building new school programs, but instead it is combating parcel tax losses by acting as a new source of revenue.

The district’s Director of Business Operations Julie Suarez wrote in an email that the solar project is “projected to offset 80 percent of our energy costs. [Southern California Edison] rates continue to rise from 3 to 6 percent annually and solar is the best way to help reduce these rising costs.”

Still, revenue is not exclusively controlled within the scope of parcel tax money and solar project benefits, the state also regulates the district’s income through other factors, including income based on the daily attendance rates of its schools.

“If we’re not getting everybody in school, every day, all the time, then we only get a percentage of the state’s revenue to the school. It’s important that we keep our attendance as high as possible,” Buchanan said.