Little League carnival congrats
The Forest Park Little League would like to thank every individual and organization that assisted us in providing a successful event on Saturday, Jan. 20, our first annual Winter Carnival Registration.
The Howard Mohr Community Center; Rich Barger for the countless hours he spent helping prepare and run the event and Bev Thompson for everything she always does.
Volunteers; Angela Mangini, Nancy Mangini, Leetta Spears, Maurice Sivek, Roy/Emily and Katie Sansone, April and Kyle Kutak, Alexa Thompson, Jessica Schanta, Jacquelyn, Ryan Pacyga, John, Misha and Liz Broecker, Danny and Steve Watson and Rory Wallace for all of their time and effort.
Local Businesses; Ultra Foods and Ed’s Way for their food donation, The Harrison Street Café’, Starship Subs, Kay’s Bakery for the cupcakes, Jimmy Johns, Famous Liquors for the popcorn, Brown Cow Ice Cream, Lenore Koca/State Farm Insurance and Trage Brothers for the use of a big screen T.V.
We would also like to thank District 209, St. Bernadine School and St. Johns for distributing our flyers to all of the children, The Park District for the use of their camera and Mayor Anthony Calderone for his monetary donation in support of our league and the time he spent at the event.
Thank you to all of the parents who registered their children for the 2007 season and a special thanks goes to our events committee who organized and ran this event; Caroline Eibenberger, Kristine Lazzara, Sandra Brown, Terry Watson, Kathy Doss and Connie Custardo. These individuals spent countless evenings meeting in order to plan a wonderful event and their time and effort is appreciated.
Thank you again to all.
Forest Park Little League Executive Board
Anthony Lazzara – President
Rich Gray – Vice President
Kathy Doss – President Girls Softball
Terri Watson – President Auxiliary
Mark Gordon – Secretary
Dave Pyan – Treasurer
Forest Park
Small task, big benefit
To whoever it was that finally got the two stop signs placed on Madison Street right next to the Forest Park Bank – thank you! It is great to be able to walk across Madison Street safely and it will increase business as well. It is sometimes the little things that make life better.
Stephanie Schiller
Forest Park
Cost of mediocrity
After reading the article in last week’s Review about District 209, something is very unsettling to me. Decades of Doubt, (the title of the article) seems like an understatement. My husband Tom and I have lived in Forest Park for 20 years and have three children. Our oldest son has graduated from Fenwick where our second son now attends as a junior. Our daughter is in the fourth grade at Garfield and fast approaching high school. Or even scarier, fast approaching middle school. She will not attend the Forest Park Middle School or Proviso High School.
Thankfully our children are blessed with a fair amount of intelligence and are for the most part all good students. Both of my sons are reaping the benefits of the education received at Fenwick despite the fact that neither of them was fully prepared for it. Also thankfully for both of them, by the second semester of freshman year, the novel idea of “studying” finally sunk in. Apparently, something their former educators didn’t find important enough to stress.
At the risk of sounding like I’m bashing the teachers at the middle school, something is wrong there. Was it always that way? Maybe all our former Forest Park friends who talked and squawked for all those years were so focused on their doubts and fears about Proviso that nobody made a big deal about the shortcomings of the middle school. I guess the fact that so many of them moved out of Forest Park around the time their oldest reached fifth grade were red flags of doubt that we ignored. Or perhaps we didn’t want to leave Forest Park and our friends. I truly hope that their quest for broader horizons and a better educational system was worth it and that all those kids are flourishing as they reach adulthood. After all, that’s what we all strive for in raising our kids. But at what price are we willing to pay?
The unsettling part for me in the article was to read that $5 million a year goes to district 209 from Forest Park tax dollars, so I took out the calculator. I was knocked to the floor to see the numbers. I took it to mean that if only 236 students from Forest Park go to these schools as stated in the article, the breakdown per student is $21,186 per year. That’s equivalent to the price tag on some pretty decent Universities around the country. Shocking to say the least, and $12,000 per year more than Fenwick.
We love Forest Park and our home and have many awesome neighbors and friends here. But once again we’re posed with the question that this time around we are asking ourselves more seriously. That is, how many more years are we willing to pay enough tuition dollars to provide a less than mediocre education for roughly three or four kids through our tax dollars on top of the private school bill for our own kids? Perhaps if we had made ourselves aware of that $5 million figure years ago, our lives would have taken a detour. That’s really sad for me to think of but I’m afraid the reality now is that we have hit another fork in the road. So once again, the burning question, as so many of us face – what to do?
Margie Wilkinson
Forest Park
Camera not the issue
As long as the officer did not intentionally turn off the camera, then the question is simple: Was there a reason for Mr. Davis to be driving with a suspended license, in addition, suspended license plates, which would justify the probable cause for a traffic stop? That’s the problem with headlines these days, “Officer fails to document controversial arrest,” how about “Driver with suspended license and registration claims police brutality following justified traffic stop!” Regardless of whether the camera was working or not, Mr. Davis should not have been behind the wheel of that automobile, end of story, or none of this would have occurred! Now am I right? It’s ridiculous that the police are almost always made to look like the bad guy when it comes to arresting the bad guys, when probable cause exists.
Mike Quan
Sugar Grove, Ill.
