I've been catching up on my newspaper reading since I got back from a vacation in Florida. The papers there are pretty uninteresting, except the Schadenfreude of reading about the poor slobs shoveling snow and freezing in the north.

I read that District 97 was thinking about a referendum next spring. According to the paper the last time the district passed a referendum to increase the tax rate in the education fund was 1989. Check this out - I was on the board of District 97 in 1989. I felt like Forest Gump.

As I continued with my newspaper catch-up, reading the headlines was not very encouraging in regard to school finances in Illinois. Here a few of those headlines: "Chicago Public School math: $1 billion deficit," "Axed state funds put Triton in crisis," and "Layoffs loom for 100 staffers in Wheaton-Warrenville." Not good. And then there was the story about District 200 suing the village for TIF money. This contretemps evokes visuals of the starving peasants fighting over the sacks of rice dumped from the speeding relief trucks.

We passed our referendum in 1989 more or less using the "two referendum" strategy. District 200 used the same strategy some years later. (I was involved in that one, too. I told you I was Forest Gump.) A two referendum strategy involves cutting travel, printing, in-service training and eliminating a few positions. It probably fails, but it gets the community talking. That's just what happened to us. Referendum No. 1 failed. So we came up with contingency plans that provided for firing a bunch of teachers, whacking art and music and eliminating co-curriculars. Now that got everybody's attention, and we passed our second referendum asking for a little less that time around. The school system was saved, and everybody lived happily ever after in a time of rising property assessments that obviated the need for future referenda. Until now.

Make no mistake, passing a referendum in 2011 will be no picnic, even using a two referendum strategy. But there is one way to maybe pull this off - freeze all salaries as the various employee contracts come up for negotiation. Three-fourths of expenses are in the labor costs. It's the only way to save any real money in the school budgeting business. The teachers will still get their annual step bump. No one will leave the district, since there's no place to go. I feel bad for the employees because most of them do a good job in difficult conditions. They're just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But then again, what do I know? Oh yeah. I was on the only District 97 board that passed a fund referendum in decades.

John Hubbuch, an Indiana native who moved to Oak Park in 1976, is a retired lawyer. Hubbuch served on the District 97 school board and coached youth sports. He is the father of three and grandfather of one.