U-46 boundary change delay riles parents
Parents upset with Elgin Area School District U-46's decision to push back boundary changes due to budget cuts turned out in force at Monday's school board meeting.
"Next year we'll still be over capacity, still be using mobiles, and still not having an art or music room," Lincoln parent Laura Lamont said. "This decision just doesn't make sense to me."
New boundaries were originally slated to be redrawn this fall and implemented in the 2011-12 academic year, but have been delayed at least a year because of budget cuts and programmatic concerns, members of the district's Citizens Advisory Council learned last week.
District spokesman Tony Sanders told the council's enrollment and facilities committee that increasing class sizes to 28 students in kindergarten through third grades and 33 students in fourth through sixth grades will inflate capacity at the district's 53 schools next year. It also will allow the district to trim the number of portable classrooms in use from 76 to 20 next year. The class size changes are expected to save U-46, which expects to begin next year with at least a $41 million budget hole, $6.6 million.
Parents, including Nature Ridge parent Jennifer Gleba, who joined the committee earlier this year to help work for solutions to the overcrowding at their children's schools, said the decision came as a shock.
According to operations consultant Jim Feuerborn's 2009-10 enrollment report, the most overcrowded school in the district is Lincoln Elementary in Hoffman Estates, at 114.2 percent capacity. Nature Ridge in Bartlett follows at 113.6 percent. Hillcrest in Elgin stands at 108.3 percent. Other schools, like Prairieview in Bartlett and Ridge Circle in Streamwood, are considered under capacity.
Superintendent Jose Torres told parents Monday "as recently as March 15, the boundary plan and process was in effect. But as we continue to look at the fiscal realities ... we realize the work you have begun doesn't go away, it's just being delayed for a couple of years probably."