Barry Hitchins, President of the Unit 5 School Board says, as promised in November, members have been getting feed back from volunteers who shared with them why they voted no on the school districts tax referendum last month to see what might change their vote to a yes should the district put another tax referendum on the ballot in April.
Hitchens also told us, “We are going to have offline discussions. There was some brief discussion at the finance committee last week. Any final action will probably be after winter break.”
Hitchens said he can’t tell us which way it might go at this point because only some of the board members were involved in the discussion at the finance committee.
Time is running short for the district. Any referendum to be placed on the ballot by Unit 5 would have to be turned in to the McLean County Clerks Office by January 17th. The next regularly scheduled board meeting is January 18th. So if the board decides to go forward with a tax referendum any announcement of a special board meeting in January would signal they doing so.
We also talked with Hitchens about the conflicting optics being presented regarding the school board continuing to hire in spite of the fact that without passing a referendum they might be facing cutting 200 positions.
Hitchens explained to us why this is not really a conflict saying, “General practice is that anyone hired during the school year is automatically RIFfed at the end of that school year.”
RIF stands for Reduction In Force so what Hitchens was saying is that all employees hired during the year are given contracts that run only until the school year ends. There are no guarantees that these employees will be hired for another school year. So if cuts had to be made in personnel the district could simply choose not to rehire these individuals.