Bloomingdale voters agree to add classrooms but not on how to staff them
Bloomingdale Elementary District 13 will create full-day kindergarten classrooms and improve aging schools now that voters have approved a $29.7 million borrowing plan.
There’s just one wrinkle: Voters also rejected a funding request that would have allowed the district to hire teachers and support staff for a new all-day kindergarten program.
The district intends to move forward with the school projects. However, officials plan to go back to the drawing board when it comes to staffing.
Legislation signed by Gov. JB Pritzker last year requires Illinois school districts to establish full-day kindergarten by the 2027-28 school year.
“Because we’re not going to be needing that staff until the fall of 2027, we do have some time to take a good long look at the issue and see what other options are available to us,” Superintendent Jon Bartelt said, “or do we need to go back and ask our voters again, prior to the implementation of full-day kindergarten, to reconsider?
“But that decision hasn't been made,” Bartelt added.
More than 58% of voters approved the plan to issue $29.7 million in building bonds.
The district will be able to move its office out of DuJardin Elementary and use that existing footprint to create full-day kindergarten classrooms. The district will put a three-classroom addition on a building wing at Erickson Elementary. Preliminary plans also involve building two stories worth of classroom space for Westfield Middle School students and building a new gym and stage facility, Bartelt said.
“We're pleased that our community supports us and has supported us in the way that they did, recognizing the need for space and the need for updates, particularly at the middle school,” Bartelt said.
With the second referendum question, the district sought to generate $2 million in additional annual revenue that would then be dedicated toward staffing for full-day kindergarten. It would have helped fund paraprofessional support and possibly additional physical education, art, and music teachers for the elementary buildings.
About 56.5% of voters, though, said “no.”
“What it means is that there's a possibility that we have to look at our staffing patterns and our enrollment patterns a little bit more critically,” Bartelt said.
Had voters approved both questions, the owner of a $370,000 home — the median home price in Bloomingdale — would have paid $698 a year in additional property taxes to the district. That homeowner is now expected to see an increase of approximately $345 a year with the approval of the building bonds.
The district has stressed that it currently doesn’t have the space or the staff to be able to offer full-day kindergarten.
“We realized it was quite an ask, but … it’s been 30 years since we have gone to the community to ask them anything for any kind of support in this type of manner,” Bartelt said.
The district, he reiterated, has enough time to put together a plan and communicate that to the community before the first day of school in the fall of 2027.
“We’re proud that the people who voted for the building bonds have faith in us to be good stewards of their dollars,” Bartelt said.
“And we intend to honor their commitment towards us by being very diligent and open about the way we move forward in this process, so that people will know how these dollars are spent and that they’re being spent for the purposes of creating safe and updated environments for kindergarten students as well as all the way up to our middle school students.”