Residents of Fairview Heights neighborhood want out of East St. Louis school district

The decades-long effort for a group of residents in the French Village area of Fairview Heights to break away from East St. Louis School District 189 continues Thursday.

The Regional Board of School Trustees of St. Clair County will hold a public hearing at 6 p.m. on a petition filed by the group to detach from East St. Louis 189 and annex to Grant Community Consolidated School District 110 and Belleville Township High School District 201.

The residents prefer the community’s school-aged kids attend Illini Elementary School, Grant Middle School and Belleville East instead of receiving a K-12 education at East St. Louis schools.

“We seek to get out because we want a better education for the children,” said Kevin Sheridan, a resident, longtime District 189 critic and co-founder of the “Detach 189” committee in 2016.

He said the committee has gathered petition signatures several times in recent years.

“It’s taken us a while to get to the point we’re at, but we’ve been persistent,” he said. “We’re just trying to forward this effort to give the children of Fairview Heights … a safe and good educational system.”

The group’s petition was filed in January by its attorney Dan Grueninger and through a designated “committee of 10,” which includes Sheridan. The regional board of school trustees then considered the petition and Regional Superintendent Mark Eichenlaub posted a public notice for the hearing in the Belleville News-Democrat in September.

The hearing was initially scheduled for Oct. 12 but postponed to Nov. 9, which was originally set as the date for a continuation hearing if additional time was needed.

The petitioning area comprises about 463 properties and 396 registered voters, according to the petition.

It needed to have signatures from a minimum of two-thirds of the registered voters in the proposed detachment territory. It had about 275 signatures when it was submitted, according to Eichenlaub.

The petition says changing districts “is in the best interest and educational welfare of students,” resulting in a “significant direct educational benefit to the petitioners’ children” and facilitating “community structure in order to implement a ‘whole child’ and ‘community of interest’ educational concept.”

At Thursday’s hearing, anyone living in the areas affected by the petition can speak, according to Eichenlaub, and the school districts will have the opportunity to present evidence as well as call and cross-examine witnesses.

Once the hearing is complete, the seven-member regional board of school trustees will go into closed session to deliberate before returning to open session to render its decision.

Neither Grant 110 nor Belleville 201 had a comment prior to the hearing.

In a written statement, East St. Louis 189 said it “maintains that the Petition for Detachment and Annexation of the subject area does not satisfy the statutory factors required for a boundary change under Article 7 of the Illinois School Code. The District continues to meet student needs in the best interests of their direct educational welfare, including those students in the subject area.”

History

This isn’t the first time the French Village residents have endeavored to part ways with East St. Louis schools.

In February 2002, 438 registered voters comprising 457 properties in the area of Fairview Heights filed a petition to detach from East St. Louis 189 and annex to Grant 110 and Belleville 201, according to the decision text from the Fifth District Appellate Court in Mount Vernon where the matter was later concluded. In March, East St. Louis 189 and Grant 110 filed requests for dismissal of the petition, which the regional board of school trustees denied. The board voted unanimously in support of the petition after the petition hearing in April.

While Belleville 201 remained neutral, Grant 110 and East St. Louis 189 later filed a complaint for administrative review in the circuit court of St. Clair County. The court affirmed the board’s decision, but Grant 110 and East St. Louis 189 then filed notices for appeal.

In August 2004, the appellate court overturned the circuit court’s judgment because the detachment would have caused “substantial detriment” to Grant 110, which would have faced an overcrowding problem, and East St. Louis 189, which said the detachment would “significantly risk” the district’s ongoing financial recovery.

A few years prior in 1997, however, a group of 36 homeowners around Kassing Drive in Fairview Heights successfully detached from East St. Louis 189 and annexed to Grant 10 and Belleville 201, according to past reporting by the Belleville News-Democrat.

And in the early 2000s, a section of Fairmont City west of Illinois 111 also detached from East St. Louis 189 and annexed to Collinsville 10, despite both districts putting up a legal fight that ended up in the Illinois Supreme Court.

Taxes

If the regional board of school trustees decides to back the petition and the residents’ request moves forward without legal opposition, residents in the detachment area would pay property taxes to both Grant 10 and Belleville 201 instead of East St. Louis 189.

This means that East St. Louis 189 would lose property tax revenue, while Grant 10 and Belleville 201 would be getting more. It is not yet clear exactly how much East St. Louis 189 would lose, but the petition states that the tax loss is less than 10%. According to county tax records, the district’s total equalized assessed value was about $203.6 million in 2022, and it was extended about $17.1 million in property taxes.

The residents of French Village would likely see their property taxes go down. The tax rate in 2022 for East St. Louis 189 was 8.4115. For Grant 110, it was 4.4827, and for Belleville 201 it was 2.0310.

Hypothetically, a $100,000 home in the petitioning area would have owed $8,411.50 in property taxes last year to East St. Louis 189. If the detachment and annexation to Grant 10 and Belleville 201 had already taken place, the home would have owed $6,513.7 in property taxes between the two districts, a difference of nearly $1,900.