It is June 2017. That is eight months out from the remarkably divisive swimming pool referendum at Oak Park and River Forest High School. The vote on the pool plan put forth by the high school was ultimately settled by 28 votes out of some 33,000 cast. The pool referendum was defeated. And that is the definition of a fractured community.
In the wake of that tumultuous election, the high school board and Joylynn Pruitt-Adams, its new superintendent, took a bold and healing step. Instead of turning right around and trying to muscle a new vote through quickly, OPRF chose a long, inclusive, consensus-building process. The goal is to find common ground on the pool while asking a large citizen-based committee to look also at a range of additional facility and instructional issues.
So far, the school has made it through a painstaking “launch committee” process designed to focus the goals, hire a facilitator, pick the catchy title of Imagine OPRF, and choose the 40-plus members from a pool of more than 80 interested applicants.
The full committee doesn’t even meet for the first time until August. And then there will be the process. Sub-committees, research, discussion, public hearings, estimates and projections, timelines. The whole fascinating and mind-numbing process of sorting out complex issues in the public way.
After all that, if there is anything approaching a consensus, there will be a report and recommendations to the school board. Yes, God help us, the school board will reenter full pool mode. Hopefully with a consensus.
If — and a big if — this all moves forward, there will need to be another referendum vote. The very, very earliest that could happen is November 2018.
June 2017 to November 2018. That is 16 months from now.
Why are we counting?
Because Monica Sheehan, the highly effective leader of the anti-pool referendum last year, has just resigned from the Imagine OPRF committee amid a volley of charges of unfairness and the “fix is in,” etc., etc. She has effectively launched the next campaign.
And we’re not buying it. Not for a minute.
Sheehan sent us her letter of resignation last week. She included a series of email exchanges she had with Pruitt-Adams casting aspersions on the nascent process. She objected to the facilitator. She alleged an imbalance between people who had previously supported the referendum and those in opposition. She said the committee was stacked with OPRF staff and made the illogical assumption that every school employee had supported the referendum. She wanted every applicant for the committee to declare how they had voted in the last election.
Then she quit and took to social media and the OakPark.com comment board to begin poisoning the waters.
The last election is the last election. We’re not going to find a solution in that narrowly split result. The challenge is to make this new process work, to consider the imperfect solutions because that is all we have on a landlocked campus, to look forward and to attempt to mend the hard feelings and move past the distrust of that out-of-character campaign.
Oak Park and River Forest don’t need and, we believe, won’t put up with 16 more months of division and name-calling.
