Hinsdale South families still have no district-verified data showing whether their students are being denied courses available at the larger Hinsdale Central, after a District 86 board committee came up empty on the question it was created to answer.

Board member Bobby Fischer, who chaired the Availability and Opportunities Committee, told the District 86 board at its Thursday, June 25, 2026, meeting that what he described as 16 months of work produced no trustworthy measure of course denials.

"Unfortunately, even after this committee, we can't speak confidently about course denials, when kids are denied a course," Fischer said. "It's a messy topic."

The problem, Fischer explained, is structural. Students are allowed to sign up for more classes than they can take, listing multiple electives as backups. That practice makes it impossible to determine from the data whether a student was truly shut out of a course or simply didn't get one of several options they listed.

The gap between the two schools shows up in other measures. On the 2025 AP School Honor Roll, 79% of Central seniors took at least one AP exam compared to 56% at South. Central earned Gold status; South earned Silver. Hinsdale South has roughly half the enrollment of Hinsdale Central and offers fewer sections in many subjects, which families have blamed for greater scheduling conflicts.

Fischer said fixing the district's data system would require expensive computer upgrades, estimating the cost at $200,000. He said he is not convinced that's a good use of district money.

He also warned against the alternative: administrators manually reviewing individual cases to determine whether denials occurred. Fischer called that approach "manipulated data." He was referring to a prior year when the administration claimed the Central-South disparity was nearly solved based on such case-by-case reviews. Board President Catherine Greenspon, in August 2025, called ending that practice a potential "final gift" from the then-retiring superintendent.

Fischer recommended disbanding the committee entirely.

Greenspon suggested that new Superintendent Chip Pettit, who started earlier in June 2026, and his team develop recommendations on how to proceed. No timeline for those recommendations has been announced.