Rob
Sherman Advocacy
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Rob
Sherman Advocacy
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"Fighting injustice, one victory at a time."
Rob Sherman today reaffirms his support for the passage of the referendum for School District 21, which will be on the ballot on Tuesday, April 1, 2003. That support was first expressed in the March edition of the Rob Sherman Television Show. Four of the reasons for that support are expressed below.
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Reason #1: Community Consolidated School District 21 is located in northwest Cook County, Illinois, about 25 miles northwest of downtown Chicago and ten miles north of O'Hare Airport. There is a referendum on the ballot in the April 1st election to raise property taxes by approximately $334 per year for the owner of a home valued at approximately $200,000. The actual net financial impact on residents, however, will be nil, for the following reason: If the referendum fails, taxes will not go up but the quality of education will go down as programs are cut and class sizes are increased. As a result of a decrease in the quality of the area's public schools, the desirability of your home will go down, so the market value of your home will go down. I figure that, for a home that would be worth $200,000 in an area with a financially stable public school district, that home would be worth only $190,000, or a decrease in $10,000, if the local public school district is in great financial distress. If the referendum is defeated, you will save about $334 per year, or about $1,000 every three years. If you sold your home in, say, twenty-one years, you will have saved about $7,000 in property taxes, but the value of your home would go down by $10,000, so you would end up with a net loss of $3,000, besides having a neighborhood of children that got a much poorer education than they could have gotten with adequately funded schools. On the other hand, passage of the referendum would raise your taxes by about $334 per year while preserving the full value of your home. Actually, the value of your home would be enhanced, because most school districts in the entire state are in financial difficulty, so finding a nice home in an area with a financially stable public school system will make your home that much more valuable. If you sold your home after that same 21 years, you would have spent an additional $7,000 on the schools, but your selling price would be $10,000 or more greater than if the referendum had failed, so you end up with a net gain of at least $3,000 compared to what your net financial recovery would have been if the referendum had failed. Plus, you would have ensured much better schools for your kids and the other kids of the neighborhood. There is no real net financial impact over the long haul. Over the short term, you could really get hit hard, financially, if the referendum fails. Suppose you sold your home in just three years. You would have paid an additional $1,000, but potentially you could lose that full $10,000 on the sale of your home. The bottom line is that, the only difference is whether we'll have really good or really lousy public elementary schools in the neighborhood, except for the possibility that the value of your home will be greatly enhanced if the referendum is approved. I'm voting "Yes" for good schools.
Reason #2: I trust the members of this particular school board and the Superintendent of Schools to be portraying accurately the financial condition of the school district and the financial need of the district. From my own review of the district's finances, I agree with them that the school district needs the money.
Reason #3: I trust the members of this particular school board and the Superintendent of Schools to stretch available dollars as far as possible and to make prudent use of the additional dollars that we may be providing to them. I didn't feel that way about the previous superintendent, but the new guy, Dr. Gary Mical, who was hired last year, is a winner who spends carefully and frugally.
Reason #4: Our school district is in very real jeopardy of failing, financially, if the referendum does not succeed. If that happens, we'll still have schools for our kids, but if the school district goes bankrupt, what would happen, next, would be that an agency of the State of Illinois would take over financial control of the school district. That agency would have complete control, without local input, to cut any program that it wanted to, raise class sizes to be as large as it felt necessary, and raise our property taxes as high as it desired to balance the books. The state agency could even raise property taxes by more than the amount proposed in the April 1st referendum, and we would have no say to stop it from happening. We don't want that to happen, do we? So, go the polls on April 1st and vote, "Yes," to maintain good schools, to preserve (or actually enhance) the value of our homes and to keep the State from taking over financial control of our schools.
For more background information about the referendum and the need for its passage, see the article in yesterday's Daily Herald entitled Financial Trouble for Schools.
Thanks, in advance, for voting in favor of the referendum on April 1st.
Rob Sherman P. O. Box
7410
Buffalo Grove, IL 60089-7410
A post office box is used
because
the street address uses a curb mail box,
which is not secure.
Telephone: (847) 870-0700
Fax: (847) 870-1156
E-mail: rob followed by the at symbol followed by robsherman dot com