It used to be a school district cliche to merely threaten canceling the football season if it’s desired spending referenda was not approved. Now one of our local school districts is going ten steps further and is suggesting everyone will be left in physical peril if 204’s desired spending package is not approved by the voters.
Interesting …
Ever knock on any of the doors of those million dollar homes in downtown Naperville during campaign season? Anyone that has ever been politically active in Naperville knows that many of those fancy homes are not just owned by doctors and lawyers. There are a whole lot of retired school administrators in our downtown hood too. These administrators have contributed greatly to the downtown becoming overwhelmingly “Blue” politically.
All of which makes 204’s safety campaign ever so interesting. Local liberals for years have suggested that raising concerns about crime and public safety is a political scare tactic, its racially bating, and its wrong.
Apparently it appears such methods are ok when employed by schools to increase spending. To be clear that is exactly what 204 is doing right now.
School boards are bankrupting Naperville taxpayers. Enough is enough. 204 needs to figure out a way to improve school security without a big hike in spending. Something tells the Watchdog taxpayers would not notice if there was a reduction in those high paying administrator positions … get the money from there.
Naperville taxpayers have been bled dry.
Vote No to this referenda question!
When we moved to Naperville in 2009, we avoided District 204 despite the better housing value (size and features vs price). One reason was because of the opulent high school it funded, putting financial strains on the district. Such tax and funding uncertainty benefits no one.
Times are hard for many. This measure is ill-timed and marketed by preying on fear. Shame on those who sponsored it. More shame on the voters if it passes.
Those downtown ‘mansions’ are not owned by anyone in District 204. This is an easy vote … NO
Laura pointed out the 204 School District does not include the downtown area and what parts of North Naperville that are in this district does not contain “mansions”. What it does contain is most of the apartment complexes within the city boundaries. So this whole part of this post is irrelevant.
Also, I thought his Website was the “City Council Watchdog” not the “District 204 Board Watchdog”. It was my understanding that this site was dedicated to issues important to all citizens of Naperville, not just some. In fact, a large chunk of 204 is not even in the city of Naperville, it’s in parts of Aurora, Bolingbrook and Plainfield.
Finally, this whole post is really nothing more than a rant against “Blue” Naperville and what is basically national politics. The constant efforts to make local politics about national politics is the real threat to our city’s prosperity and governance, not the city of Chicago or Cook County. The introduction of national politics into local elections is nothing more than an effort to divide our community, not unite it, in a way that benefits a national political agenda while distracting from real local issues that need addressing.
This is just another example of the type of post that would never have appeared on this site under the prior, original founding, management.
To be clear, crime rate stats are down across the country and in the overwhelming majority of cities in the US, so pushing a narrative of public safety issues based on anecdotal stories is misleading at best.
This is what the “blue” or liberal issue is, with people on the right using anecdotal criminal horror stories to promote their political agenda is all about. Criminal horror stories are nothing new. We have seen them in the Kansas Clutter family killings (In Cold Blood), Tate murder (Helter Skelter) as well as in Naperville with a mom drowning her children and a father executed in his car while waiting to pick up his child. Stories like these do not mean crime rates are up or that these types of crimes are more prevalent.
Concerns for public school safety have grown as the number of incidents of guns and gunfire in schools has increased over the years. This is not an anecdotal story but a documented crime stat. And how best to solve the problem varies greatly between the right and left.
The left wants stricter gun laws to make the increased use of guns by citizens of this country in schools harder. This is unacceptable to the right as it violates the 2nd amendment.
The right wants greater school security (more armed guards, metal detectors, ways to secure classrooms, etc.). The left is against turning schools into armed camps with prisons like security systems.
The common ground here is that both sides want their children safe in school and doing this is more important than how. Restrictive gun laws are bogged down in our legal quagmire, so the only alternative remaining is increased school security measures (guards, “safe-room” classrooms, metal detectors, etc). The one thing the left has been constant about is its willingness to find a compromise solution (making fixing the problem more important than how it is fixed).
So, while the left would prefer another solution, they are willing to accept the solution of the right for now. But more guards (increased payroll), metal detectors (increased equipment cost) and “safe-room” classrooms (increased capital cost) all mean spending more money and the only way a school district can do this is though increased property taxes.
So my question for the right is – what is more important to you, your children being safe in school or your pocket book?
Note: Only about 1/3 of Naperville’s population has public school age children.
A purely gratuitous mention of North Naperville to illustrate a point on District 204’s grotesquerie-bourgeois ballot measure is tacky and beneath even your boorish pedantry. None of North Naperville is located in 204, and we have no particular desire to be tied to their fiscal shenanigans, TYVM. District 203, the vastly superior District in town, knows how to work that Denial of Football Privilege angle flawlessly. They will pass any ballot measure to insure the safety of those retired administrators pensions, and flog us with Loss of Programs every election season. The carpetbaggers in 204, on the other hand, seems to not know the value of telling this year’s Seniors that they might not have valid diplomas at graduation, or that bathrooms will only be open on alternate days in convincing that insignificant less than 30% family-engaged voting bloc. The “Building is Going To Fall On Your Head, Maybe” angle seems alarmist and overkillery of the worst sort. What gold-plated nest-feathering load of unnecessary taxation is this? We don’t need it. Instead- let’s give the financially unaliving NC-17 Network to the kids in 204 to work on their A/V skills, and double bonus- a building that isn’t falling down!
Blue Man Jim, seriously- let’s give the first statement a few moments to breathe and see if it can survive as coherent dialogue on it’s own, your time-honored tradition of talking to yourself in the digital void—truly classic. They say the first sign of irrelevance is when you’re the only one replying to your own posts. But hey, who better to appreciate your wisdom than… yourself? Keep the conversation going, Swami Jimmy—someone’s got to pretend to care.
Still sounds to us that you have acceptable levels of murder and mayhem that you accept in pursuit of your equitable fantasies. Guess that Suburban Violence Driven Rage is gonna hafta happen right? How did Mao put it- Sometimes you have to sacrifice a few cadres of the intellectuals to make an omelet?