Potential school boundary change in St. Charles troubles parents

Some Anderson Elementary students who started their education with dreams of attending St. Charles East High School would instead go to St. Charles North High School in a pending attendance boundary change in District 303. The change is just a sampling of a boundary discussion that will affect many more district students in coming months.

The changes planned for Anderson will not occur until the 2017-18 school year. It affects homes located near the Red Gate Road Bridge, which has provided for a closer connection to North than the current bus ride to East.

The one-year delay will allow current eighth-graders to attend East next year. That's a concession for parents who have been protesting the boundary change. They said their eighth-graders have already gone through orientation activities and class selection at East. A change this late in the school year would undo all the efforts to get them ready for high school, parents said.

There are 48 seventh-graders in the impacted neighborhoods who will be the first students to switch schools. There are 104 students in grades four through six, including possible siblings of students attending East, who would be affected by the change in future years.

District officials said the boundary change is needed to help address the impact of declining enrollment projections. North High School is expected to see a more drastic population decline than East. Shifting boundaries will help make sure the student population at one high school isn't drastically larger than the other. East, which is a larger school, already has 460 more students than North.

Concerns like that will be part of a much larger district attendance boundary change discussion that will occur if and when district officials close Haines Middle School.

School board members are in the middle of discussing the timeline to ask local taxpayers for more money to upgrade Thompson and Wredling Middle Schools. Upgrades are needed to accommodate students previously destined to attend Haines.

Closing Haines will also help address space issues associated with declining enrollment as well as provide cost savings in the face of threats to state funding the district receives. While the one-year delay seemed to mollify some of the objecting parents, others with children of various ages still expressed anger. Some parents went as far as to suggest Anderson is being targeted now because of a history of students with relatively low test scores moving onto East, which has also problems meeting some of the achievement goals under the former No Child Left Behind standards.

District officials said the changes are strictly about enrollment trends and district geography.