U-46 board gets earful over high school courseload caps

Parents, students and teachers spent more than an hour this week expressing their resounding disapproval over Elgin Area School District U-46's decision to firmly cap courseloads at six classes, imploring administrators to consider taking a pay cut in the name of academics.

"The district informed us of this decision three months too late," Elgin High School counselor Helen Harris told the school board. "There was no time or process to make a good decision. ... Why wasn't this publicized in advance?"

The Daily Herald broke the story Jan. 14, after hearing from several parents whose children were being asked to drop an extra elective in next year's schedule.

U-46 officials have touted the decision as an "increase in accountability" - not a change.

Superintendent Jose Torres said Monday that students have, since 2003, been expected to take six classes, with the intention of allowing a select few to drop a study hall and take a seventh class. Along with art, fashion and music classes, driver's education and ACT test tutorial classes are considered electives.

"Directions to school level administrators was to have students sign up for six classes. They were given an allocation for a limited number of students to have an additional seventh class," he said. "But all of that cost resources. This year with myself being new in terms of the registration process, we looked at standards and made maybe a wrong assumption that what was in writing was actually in practice. We went about ensuring that those staffing standards were executed."

Now, only academy students, students new to English, and special education students will have the option of taking seven classes - at least for now.

By registering a majority of students for six classes apiece now, Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Education Greg Walker said, district officials will be able to get a handle on whether staff cuts are necessary.

"If we do it properly, it may have implications," he said. "We won't know until we have the tallies."

Bartlett High School parent Dan Kaiser said he had heard nothing of the courseload cap until his child came home and said "look what we got at school today. They asked us to scratch a class off."

The move is closely tied to the district's efforts to pare down its mounting deficit.

But parents worry that the district's high school test scores - behind the state average in both reading and math last year - will only slip more.

"Resources and money exist here to get it done right," Kaiser said, calling on administrators to take pay cuts to enable students to take more classes.

A Facebook group, "U-46 students against cutting down classes," has grown to 973 members in just a few short days.

"As teenagers, we won't pretend to understand the complexities behind budgets," 15-year-old South Elgin High student Aida Palma told the board.

"But we ask that in every decision, administrators take us into consideration."

Torres told parents that the district hopes that later this spring, high schools will "be able to go back to some students (wishing to take seven courses) and in those classes that might not be filled to capacity, sign those additional students."

How U-46 test scores match up Percent of U-46 high school juniors meeting/exceeding standards, compared to state School Reading Math Bartlett 62.9 58.8 Streamwood 37.5 40.0 Elgin 41.3 41.1 Larkin 38.8 35.3 South Elgin 55.9 48.3 State 56.9 51.6