Five Warren Township HS Students Upset They Can't Finish At School
(CBS) -- Five Lake County students, four who will be seniors and one a junior, are upset that they're not allowed to finish high school where they started. But the school district says they should take it up with their parents.
It all began in 2012 in a Warren Township subdivision with about 80 homes and those families' desire to switch from Warren Township High School to Libertyville High School.
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It went through the legal system and the courts didn't approve it finally until last fall.
It will affect five students most directly this fall: four who will be seniors and one who will be a junior.
All five want to stay at Warren Township High School to finish. The school has told them no.
Two of the seniors made a tearful appeal before the Warren Township High School board: "Warren is so important to us, we will continue to fight even if the doors have already been closed."
"We're not happy that we have our own students crying and saying, 'I want to stay at Warren,'" says Dr. Mary Perry Bates, superintendent at Warren Township High School District 121. She says it's the students' parents who put them in that position.
"They won. They got what they wanted. And they need to move on."
Andy Patel, the parent of an incoming junior, says he and other families who signed the petitions to switch school districts three years ago never realized the process would take so long.
"My son was in seventh grade," he says.
Nikhil Patel will be a junior in the fall, and he is one of the five students who wants to finish his education at Warren Township.
