St. Charles D303 listens to parents on grade level centers
Davis and Richmond Elementary School parents on Monday voiced support and vented concerns for perhaps the final time before St. Charles Unit District 303 school board members decide if the two buildings would be better off as grade level centers.
About 20 parents signed up to comment on the plan. The district staff developed the idea when declining enrollment at Richmond triggered a need to either close the building or come up with something innovative. More than 100 students left the school after it was tagged with the failure label under No Child Left Behind rules.
Just about every parent who spoke agreed some form of change is needed. Most even seemed willing to give the grade level center plan a shot.
But other parents held onto the idea of community schools and kids walking to buildings their siblings also attend as key to the education they want for their families.
Many of those parents supported the concept of turning one of the schools into more of a magnet school where parents could opt into enhanced foreign language, science and technology offerings.
But Superintendent Don Schlomann said a magnet or school choice option has many of its own pitfalls. Such schools are typically more costly, he said. And he’s not convinced the 150 critical mass of students for such a magnet school would materialize.
Moreover, creating a magnet school still leaves the district with the problem of having one school with a demographic that’s way more challenged than the rest of the district, he said.
“It would probably still give us a building of 40 percent low-income students,” Schlomann said. “Our plan gives you one with 24 percent. Right now we’re at 62 percent poverty level at Richmond. I don’t think anybody sitting here thinks that’s the face of St. Charles.”
The other obstacle the school board now faces in deciding what to do is how to answer questions of fairness to parents at all the other schools who won’t have the automatic ability to attend either Davis or Richmond.
“This is a great opportunity, but yet it’s not going to be helping my child,” said Lisa Murphy. “How are we going to be able to roll this out to the other schools?”
Schlomann said the answer is it’s not going to be fair and the other schools in the district won’t be considered for a similar setup until the success or failure of the Davis-Richmond plan is evaluated. That will likely take two years.
“The risk in regards to this is in doing something that’s slightly off of what we’ve consistently held, and that’s that every child ought to have the same opportunity at any time,” Schlomann said. “We’re just not going to be able to offer the economies of scale at every school.”
The full school board must still vote before the plan can be implemented at the beginning of the next school year.