On Jan. 31, 2023, Mahomet-Seymour Board President Max McComb wrote an opinion piece for the News-Gazette in rebuttal to what board member Meghan Hennesy said at the Jan. 17, 2023, regularly scheduled board of education meeting. The following are just excerpts from those pieces. Hennesy’s speech (Jan. 17) can be found here. McComb’s opinion piece (Jan. 31) can be found here.
This project is not an attempt to look at every issue that was brought up in its entirety. This publication has reported on some of these issues before. In those cases, links are provided so that each reader can learn more about the issue. The articles that follow are an attempt to look at the claims each board member brought up. In some cases, one board member named others. In those cases, this publication looked at what happened surrounding those claims. All of the articles can be found on this page. Each article also includes documents and videos referenced.
We understand that this piece comes two months after these events took place. We have taken time to watch discussions of every topic over the last three years, to look at board agendas and minutes from the same time period, to read emails, to send FOIA requests and to undertake a major project in analyzing TIF data. This work took time, and that is why it took so long to complete.
Quotes from Hennesy
“I think if I were to predict, I think you’ll see more trailers coming your way. I think we’ll see larger class sizes. I think we’ll see the asks of teachers get larger and heavier and more untenable. I think we should expect to see talk of shorter school weeks. We should watch for other ways to manipulate taxpayers into feeling like if we don’t do something the children are going to suffer. But for me, this is a result because at the moment that we needed to act, we didn’t; we didn’t change trajectory, we didn’t change our focus, we didn’t focus on what was important.”
Meghan Hennesy
Looking Back
With a growing population that hasn’t begun to plateau, Mahomet-Seymour has recognized that its facilities are too small for over a decade.
In June 2022, the district asked taxpayers for $97 million to address facility needs throughout the district. When that measure failed, they came back in Nov. 2022 and asked taxpayers for $59.4 million to build a junior high school. That question also failed.
Discussion about whether or not the district did or does enough to understand how the community wants to solve the problem stopped in Nov. 2022 when board member Ken Keefe asked the board of education to consider a spring 2023 referendum. Seeing the next time to put a question on the ballot in the spring of 2024, and the immediate need for larger facilities, Keefe, Hennesy and Schultz wanted to see a question on the ballot, but McMurry, Henrichs, Lamb and McComb voted against doing that. McMurry and Henrichs said they did not vote to move another referendum decision forward because they did not believe the board could agree on anything.
At the time, board members agreed, though, at some level, that the district needed to engage the community again in order to understand their vote. Some wanted to understand why voters did not support the referendums while others wanted to see what voters would approve. Despite agreeing that this needed to move forward, the district has not approached this topic again.
The Nov. meeting was not the first time Hennesy, Schultz, and Keefe had asked the board of education to explore different options than a junior high school. While the district’s solution was the Bulldog Blueprint initiative, Hennesy, Schultz, and Keefe had consistently asked for the district to find ways to address capacity issues, even if a referendum failed. They also wanted to continue engaging with the community outside of the Bulldog Blueprint initiative that concluded in the fall of 2021.
Also on the table was a proposal by Keefe and Lamb to look at land the district could purchase in order to establish a long-term facilities plan. Some community members want to see a high school built, others believe a junior high will solve the immediate problem, while others see that the district may need to rethink how the elementary schools are structured and acknowledge that a new secondary building may also be needed. The search for land has not been discussed again.
Perhaps these issues will be brought up again after new board members are seated in May 2023. Board members McComb and McMurry don’t believe anything will pass unless all of the board members support the referendum question. Community members, though, have voiced their distaste for the price tag and the longevity of the previous plans.
Seeing as not all residential developments that have been approved are completed, and that the Village has its sights set on additional development that will come along with the extension of South Mahomet Road, the potential for additional students coming into the district is great.
This could add additional stressors to classrooms throughout the district. Currently, concessions are being made in every building as they try to make space for more students. Without additional space and teachers, class size is likely to increase in a district that already has class sizes larger than the state average.
In order to get voters to see the need for classroom space, the district used mailers to tell constituents about the need, and what would happen if voters did not approve the two referendums. Those mailers told voters, “Portables are not a threat. They are a reality and already in use. If we don’t take steps to address growing enrollment, they will become a permanent fixture at all of our schools.”
On March 6, the Mahomet-Seymour School Board approved a 3-year lease for a two-classroom modular building at Mahomet-Seymour Junior High for about $230,000. McComb said the district “may need more of these before they need less.”
Capacity issues are not the only stressor on the Mahomet-Seymour School District at this time. Recently they’ve also had to adjust bus schedules due to a lack of bus drivers, they’ve had trouble finding substitute teachers and the district has also had open positions in recent years.
Materials used in this article
