U-46 study looks for classroom equity

An Elgin Area School District U-46 capital planning study aims to provide a solution for a long-standing thorn in the district's side: mobile classrooms.

The study, to focus on space and capacity, hopes to minimize the use of -- and spending on -- mobile classroom units throughout the district, said Executive Director of Operations Jeff King.

King, along with Chief Financial Officer John Prince, outlined the proposed study's aims at last week's school board meeting.

The district's last capital planning study was completed in 1998, King said.

The new study hopes to align facility, classroom, technology and parking needs with the academic goals of the district. "We want to create equity from school to school," he said.

King and Prince said they hope to select a consultant by February, with the study completed by December 2008.

U-46 will use 95 classrooms in 64 mobile units at Bartlett, Larkin and Streamwood high schools, Canton Middle school and 17 elementary schools in the 2007-08 school year, a July school board resolution stated. That's one more classroom and one more mobile than in the 2006-2007 year.

Of those 17 elementary schools with mobile units, 15 are more than 50 percent Hispanic.

Twenty-one of the district's 40 elementary schools have a Hispanic majority, according to data from 2007 State Report Cards.

Only six of those 21 primarily Hispanic schools operate without mobile units.

Crowding in schools with large minority populations is a pillar of the racial discrimination lawsuit pending against the district.

The demographer from Massachusetts-based Gann-McKibben who helped U-46 redraw its attendance boundary map before the 2004-05 school year underestimated population growth in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods, King said in 2006.

"In areas where the demographic is more heavily Hispanic, that's where I've seen the demographer and the Citizens Advisory Council made some wrong assumptions," King said last year.

King was not available for comment Monday on whether minimizing the use of mobile classrooms could affect school boundaries.