Oregon School Board votes again to close David L. Rahn Junior High School

OREGON — For the second time in seven months, the Oregon School Board has voted to close the David L. Rahn Junior High School in Mt. Morris at the end of this school year.

The board voted 4-2 to close the school — the last one remaining in Mt. Morris — after a 90-minute public hearing on Tuesday during which several attendees asked that the school be kept open. Approximately 100 people, most residents of Mt. Morris, attended the meeting in the Oregon High School library.

“What’s the rush?” asked Karen Urish, a Mt. Morris resident. “This deserves more of a comprehensive study than what was done.”

Urish said she was “distressed” by board members’ reluctance to have an “open dialogue with the public” during meetings.

“The board needs to make this decision, not the superintendent,” she said.

In May 2021, Oregon Superintendent Tom Mahoney proposed closing DLR and moving seventh- and eighth grade students to Oregon High School, 5 miles to the east. At that time, he cited decreasing enrollments throughout the district and increasing maintenance costs at DLR as reasons for the closure. On Aug. 16, school board members voted to close the school.

Tuesday night’s vote followed a January decision by the school board to rescind its August vote. That decision was made after Rob Urish — Karen’s husband, a former school board member and member of the advisory board formed last year for input on the closure — said the school board was apparently ignorant of an Illinois law that went into effect July 30, 2021. He said that required three public hearings be held prior to a vote in order to solicit input from communities regarding the closure of a school unless the building was deemed to be unsafe, unsanitary or unfit for occupancy.

Bruce Obendorf, a former school board member and also a member of the advisory board, said Mahoney’s financial reasons for closing the school were no longer viable.

“I feel this plan has been in the works for years,” Obendorf said, noting that the district finances were in good shape. “I am disappointed in the board and Tom Mahoney for totally disregarding the citizens of Mt. Morris.”

Board members voting not to close the school were Molly Baker and Mindy Nesemeier. Board members Corey Buck, Mary Jo Griffin, Mike Guzman and Becky Duke voted to close the school. Board president Byran Wills did not cast a vote, but said he was in favor of closing the school due to financial concerns.

Nesemeier said she wanted to wait to vote in order to hear from the district’s attorneys on whether doing so that night was legal.

“Our legal team has looked at this six ways from Sunday and said we’re within our rights,” Wills replied.

“People say the building doesn’t matter, but the building matters,” Nesemeier later said. “If the building didn’t matter, we’d all still be e-learning.”

The decision whether to close DLR is a huge responsibility, Wills said.

“Sometimes those hard decisions aren’t made and people kick the can down the road and suddenly it’s really bad,” he said. “Kicking the can down the road, we’ve done that over and over and over again, and it turned out horribly.”

The two school districts merged in 1994 after the Mt. Morris School District dissolved due to financial reasons.

In addition to saving maintenance costs, Mahoney has said the pros of closing DLR include: allowing junior high students to have access to additional elective courses at the high school; aligning the curriculum more closely and providing more frequent opportunities for staff to collaborate; bringing more coaches/sponsors to a building where some sports/activities have no coaches in the building; and allowing for more staff collaboration while also giving younger athletes more immediate exposure to older athletes.

In a multi-page presentation made last fall, the advisory board argued that the 1950s DLR building was in “sound shape,” could still serve as a “viable educational facility” and that the district’s finances did not warrant the school’s closing.

Rob Urish said Tuesday’s vote was disappointing.

“As you might imagine we are incredibly disappointed,” Urish said after the meeting. “The perception — you know, perception’s reality — the perception was that all of the work, all the effort, all the information, all the data really fell on deaf ears.”

He said he takes board members’ comments regarding all the information they had considered as genuine, but still finds it “very difficult to understand what their line of thinking was.”

“They evidently still are hanging their hat on finances and what future finances might or might not be, and we don’t believe that that’s really the issue here,” Urish said. “The issue is the proper and thorough education of our children, and there’s a whole series of associated issues about absenteeism, turnover.

“I don’t want to see bad things happen. I don’t think anybody does. But at this point, we don’t see the path to the future to the district becoming the educational destination that they aspire to. It just doesn’t seem to be in the cards,” he said.