Once there was a high school in Park Forest for which more than 99% of the town’s residents voted to tax themselves so their children could attend a nearby school and get a good education.
Once, the school was the pride of the community and it still proudly displays a permanent billboard over its shuttered front door attesting to when US News & World Report hailed it as “One of America’s Best Schools.”
Today, the building sits unused on its 56-acre site fronting Sauk Trail. Today, the school’s athletic fields are unused, its school rooms vacant, its aura and prestige a distant memory. Today, Rich East High School is a memorial to what once was; but is now a concrete image to the past with only that obsolete sign to chronicle its worth.
In October 2019, the Rich Township School District 227 Board, citing the $169 million needed to make necessary repairs — including tons of concrete required to shore up the foundation of the 67-year-old facility and a school with a rapidly declining attendance level — voted 4-3 to close the building and move students to either the Rich South campus in Richton Park or the Rich Central campus in Olympia Fields.
One month later, the board approved a $105 million bond issue — narrowly drawn to dodge voter approval — to expand facilities at the other two schools including a new athletic complex at Rich South. Meanwhile, Rich East was gathering dust. The only sign of life came last year when the school’s parking lot was cordoned off and, according to one source, was used to store roofing materials for the other two campuses.
Even before the school was shuttered at the end of the 2020 school year, there were numerous discussions as to whether the building could be transformed from a traditional school into a vocational school serving the south suburbs.
The plan was always there, but there seemed little in the way of progress.
So it was that when six of the seven candidates running for the 227 Board in the April elections, met Thursday in a forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters of the Park Forest Area, potential plans for Rich East took center stage.
Three seats are at stake including those of two incumbents, Andrea Bonds and Randy Alexander, while board member Cheryl Coleman decided not to run. Others on the April 4 ballot are Keith White, Shagmond Lowery, Lamekia Davis and Mason Newell. One candidate, Kristine Rucker-Morrow, was absent.
The first question asked was for each candidate’s views about the empty school’s future as a different kind of school and each replied.
Alexander said it was a “good thing.
Bonds said “I support it.
White said it “sounds good in theory,” adding he had not seen any plans.
A second question was “if Rich East remains vacant, what should be done with it?” All were in some sort of agreement the structure needs to be used as some sort of resource for the district.
That’s when the elephant entered the room.
Why has there been little progress made?
When that question was posed to Alexander after the forum, he said such a facility needs the support of other school districts in the south suburbs along with Prairie State College and Governors State University. All this, he said, takes time to plan and coordinate.
Funding is needed, Alexander said, saying perhaps the old building needs to be rebuilt. But he warned the perception that District 227 should take the burden of paying for such a task was wrong and that school districts wishing to join need to pick up the financial pieces in a concerted partnership.
Today, the sign over the school’s locked front door, “One of America’s Best High Schools,” is nearly two decades old and, like the vacant building, subject to the rigors of time. Today, Rich East High School, first opened in 1952, lies crumbling in the dust of disuse, resembling nothing more than a dried and faded flower pressed between the yellowed pages in the book of community memory.
Jerry Shnay is a freelance columnist for the Daily Southtown.
