Maps force tough choices in Dist. 300

Now that the Community Unit District 300 school board has approved new attendance boundaries, many parents have a difficult decision to make: Do I send my kids to a new school or drive them to school every day?

The board on Monday redrew the maps for the district's middle and high schools, shifting hundreds of kids from crowded east-side schools to under-capacity schools on the west side.

The board decided to allow all current seventh-graders and high-schoolers to stay at their current school even if they now live within new boundaries.

Students who choose this option, however, will not be able to use district transportation to get to school.

Many affected students live in Dundee Township, in the area bounded by Huntley, Randall and Binnie roads.

Parents from this area said their kids now face a long bus ride to Hampshire High School, which they fear may not have the same course offerings as the district's other high schools.

"I don't want my kids on a bus for an hour going to a high school that far away, and a high school that's not going to have all the programs that I'm paying for," said Chris French, who lives on Adams Drive, just west of Randall Road, with her two elementary-age grandchildren.

Parents said the district presented them with a false choice when it allowed kids to stay at their current school.

"They're going to be to a certain extent pointing a gun to our heads: Either drive your kids, or have them go to another school," said Martin Matushek, who lives in the Binnie Hills subdivision.

Some parents said they felt betrayed after supporting the district during referendums.

"We reached into our pocket … to give them the money," said Lisa Kosmas, a Gleneagle Farms resident, "and now we get shafted by getting sent out to the middle of nowhere."

Some upset parents live in Carpentersville neighborhoods just north of Spring Hill Mall, which will shift from Dundee-Crown High School to Jacobs High School.

"My older daughter is in a lose-lose situation," Newport Cove resident Stacy Faulkner wrote in a letter to the board. "Three out of the four years she will be attending Jacobs, it will be overcrowded anyway, because of all of the grandfathered students staying at Jacobs."

Students in Gilberts and in Pingree Grove also will shift west and attend middle and high school in Hampshire.

Superintendent Ken Arndt said he intends to have the same opportunities available at Hampshire that are offered at the other high schools and that the district will try to limit the time kids spend on a bus to 30 minutes.

"We are going to make sure our kids have the same academic opportunities they currently have," Arndt said.

Board members said they had to address crowded east-side schools and that some parents would have been upset no matter what decision was made.

"No matter which way we go, it's going to make somebody unhappy," board President Joe Stevens said. "We have to shift things to the west in order to accommodate the growth that will be taking place."