Next Monday evening, the combined school boards and top officials of the elementary schools in River Forest and Oak Park, along with Oak Park and River Forest High School, will gather for a tri-board meeting.
While the agendas for such meetings tend to be a bit generic, the impulse is an altogether healthy one. And while we respect that each elected board will ultimately value its own perceived interests the most highly, we know that parents and taxpayers in these two villages yearn for collaborative efforts that will boost academic and social progress while also looking for ways to share costs and possibly programs.
This is not a call for a unit district. That’s never going to happen. Probably it shouldn’t happen. But could there be real headway on sharing technology, on improving communication, in getting past the divisions of past decades and focusing on how to genuinely improve articulation from the middle schools to the high schools?
We think that’s doable.
Each district still sports a shiny new superintendent. They don’t care about perceived slights from the 1990s. The recent TIF lawsuit that embroiled two of these three school districts is past.
Next Monday is a good time to be bold in our thinking about how our three excellent school systems can work better together.