Lyons Township High School in Illinois lost 10 percent of its student body since 2019 but hired near-record numbers of teachers — and taxpayers are footing the bill for a system that pads payroll while the kids disappear.
Illinois Report Card data shows the school now has one teacher for every 13 students, down from one in 16 in 2006, even as enrollment dropped from over 4,000 to 3,582. This is the government education racket compressed into a single data point: staff multiplies, students vanish, results stay flat, and the property tax bills never stop coming.
The numbers are blunt. According to the Illinois Report Card, as reported by Patch, Lyons Township High employed 270 full-time teacher equivalents last school year — nearly the most since the state started publishing the figure in 2006. Only 2024 was higher, at 273. Meanwhile, enrollment fell by more than 60 students to 3,582. Two decades ago, the school had 3,826 students and fewer teachers. Now it has fewer kids and more staff per capita than ever.
The trend isn't isolated. Patch reports that wealthy suburban schools across the area — Hinsdale Central, Hinsdale South, and York High — are seeing similar enrollment declines. The official explanation: falling birth rates and people leaving Illinois. But the staffing levels don't reflect that demographic reality. The payroll grows regardless.
The school has a history of overbuilding for demand that never showed up. In the early 1960s, during the baby boom exodus to suburbia, the school board bought land in Willow Springs for a planned third campus. Enrollment dropped in the late 1970s and stabilized, eliminating the need for the building. The land sat unused for decades. Next week, the school is finally opening bids to sell it — more than 50 years of taxpayer capital locked up in a property the district never needed.
That unused land is a fitting monument to the system: always planning for growth that doesn't come, always spending money that isn't justified, never contracting when the facts demand it.
Meanwhile, the institutions tasked with educating children increasingly double as scenes of police operations. In Stafford County, Virginia, WJLA reported that a large police presence descended on Mountain View High School and Margaret Brent Elementary on Thursday after a juvenile went missing. Both schools were placed under
