In a tight budget year in Springfield, finding a way to send $40 million to the District 209 Proviso Township High Schools for a sports complex at Proviso West could not have been easy.
That the idea came from Chris Welch, speaker of the Illinois House and a proud 1989 graduate of West, certainly made it easier.
Welch’s career has been entwined with D209. He was the all-powerful school board president in the district for many years. In that role he did some good but he also ran the place like a fiefdom, even as it became a less stable school system, with falling scores and an ever-changing cast of dubious administrators.
He used that Proviso base to narrowly win a seat in the state legislature – very narrowly beating then Forest Park commissioner Rory Hoskins in that race.
Elections have consequences. Welch went to Springfield where he has been a notably better state rep than he was a school board leader. And with charm and smarts, he parlayed that seat into the speakership as Michael Madigan finally got what was coming to him.
Again, Welch has, so far, been an effective speaker in the tripartite Democratic leadership of Illinois – Pritzker, Welch and Harmon.
And so it is not a surprise, or the worst thing, that he siphoned off $40M for his alma mater. A new sports complex on the Hillside campus would be a huge upgrade. Is it essential in a state with many needs? No, but it will give a school district just now restarting its hoped-for comeback a big and unexpected shiny object to focus on and build off of.
No Kings
Both Forest Park and Oak Park will be represented this Saturday as defiant opposition to President Donald Trump rises up across America in the No Kings protest.
That Oak Parkers will crowd Scoville Park and Lake Street is hardly a surprise. It was just in April that a large crowd gathered in the same place to object to the early months of the second Trump presidency. We expect a large, boisterous and peaceful crowd at Oak Park’s effective town square.
More interesting to us is the nascent effort to draw a crowd to protest Trump at Constitution Court in Forest Park. We don’t doubt Forest Park’s increasingly progressive mindset. This is the week the village enthusiastically supported an exuberant Pride event and marked Juneteenth as well.
Turns out that Tom Holmes, a longtime Review opinion columnist, has a hand in this along with others. We’ll be curious to see who gathers at Forest Park’s “town square” on Madison Street this Saturday.
