Illinois teacher commits suicide citing working conditions

[frazzled]

13. The problem in Illinois is more complex

Illinois has a ridiculous number of school districts--more than 800, due to longstanding adherence to notions of local control. Quite a number of them have only one or two schools in the entire district, but have their own administrative staff (superintendents, etc.). This particular school district, Ford Heights School District 169, has only two schools in it: a PK-4 school and a K-8 school. It serves a total of 700 students. (Compare that to Chicago Public Schools, which has more than 600 schools and serves 450,000 students.)

The governor is trying to form a plan to consolidate a number of these miniscule districts together in order to save on administrator salaries, provide more coherent policies, etc. But it's getting a lot of pushback.

I can't say for sure, but if the administration in this district was truly this bad that it drove someone to suicide, maybe they are just a bit too insular and autocratic, and perhaps would benefit from joining a broader coalition that could bring some balance (and probably hire better a better administrator, because instead of, say, 3 separate superintendents there could be just one, recruited with a higher salary and, hopefully, better credentials). I don't know that this was about funding formulas. We really don't have enough information. It sounds bad, and I'm sure that working with kids from this kind of poor, blue-collar environment is depressing. But you probably have to have some personal instability as well to do something like this: nonetheless, she certainly must have felt deeply about the situation with the district. I don't think it's for us to make any firm judgments from this paltry amount of information.

Ford Heights is a community of about 3500 people 25 miles southeast of Chicago. It's 96% white, 0.06% African American, 2.5% Hispanic. The shocking statistic for me to read is that of the population, 45.3% is under the age of 18 (that's huge!), 11.2% 18-24, and 22.7% from 25-44. Most of the seniors must have fled: they constitute just 6.8% of the population. The median household income is a shocking $17,500. We're talking a kind of third-world skewing of the population here. According to its Wikipedia entry: "Often viewed as one of Chicago's most impoverished suburbs and at one point the poorest suburb in the United States.,[8] Ford Heights has experienced high levels of political corruption, decaying infrastructure, and an elevated crime rate." We're talking a serious situation here.