Vote YES

In the upcoming March 17th election, we will be able to vote on a referendum that will keep our District 45 schools moving forward. We need to vote yes!

District 45 has made tremendous academic gains in recent years, thanks to collaborative work between our community and district.

Many of these improvements would not have been possible without the community’s overwhelming approval of a $30 million bond referendum in 2020. In addition to helping improve academic performance, this referendum allowed the district to establish full-day kindergarten, build a new Early Childhood Center, and enhance school safety and security. It also helped improve accessibility and address infrastructure challenges.

However, the recent academic gains are at risk. District 45 is funded at only 85% of adequacy, operating with nearly $8 million less per year than recommended. This is largely due to a lack of state and federal funding, with our district receiving only 20% of funding from these sources compared to 36% in the average district in Illinois.

For years, our district was able to make do. But then COVID hit, requiring necessary but costly expenditures to improve health and safety during the pandemic crisis while also significantly increasing the cost of the approved referendum projects. In addition, the cost of education has increased exponentially. These factors led to fiscal deficits from 2020 to 2023, reducing the district’s fund balance from a healthy 57% in 2015 to a concerning 18% now.

The current district leadership team, led by the new superintendent and a fiscally responsible board, have actively worked to improve the district’s finances by fighting for additional federal and state funding while reducing expenditures, trying to keep cuts as far away from classrooms as possible. They’ve made significant cuts at the administrative level, eliminating six central office positions and not filling a seventh. And they are practical in how they spend our tax dollars, spending less per student than the state average and peer districts in DuPage County.

However, with deficits projected in future years, unless the district receives additional funding, difficult decisions will need to be made to balance the budget as early as March of 2026. This includes teacher layoffs, larger class sizes, reduced programming, decreased staff and student support, delayed facility maintenance, and, if finances continue to get worse, building closures and redistricting.

That’s why District 45 transparently communicated their financial situation to the public and facilitated an open, honest discussion over how the community would like to proceed. The result is the community-driven plan for the future of our schools that is on our ballots now as a referendum.