District 300's school boundary changes won't cure all crowding

It's official. The Community Unit District 300 school board this week approved new attendance boundaries for middle and high schools.

The plans the board approved are designed to ease crowding in the district's east-side schools by shifting students west.

But as board members were quick to point out, the boundary changes are not a cure-all.

In the short term, grandfathering will mitigate the impact of the boundary changes.

This policy, also approved this week, allows current seventh-graders and high-schoolers to stay at their current schools even if they live outside the school's attendance boundaries.

According to the district's own estimates, if all students exercise the option to stay at their current school, this would effectively nullify the boundary changes for two to three years.

At Monday night's board meeting, board President Joe Stevens called this the district's "nightmare scenario."

"You could see trailers at Jacobs because we could not accommodate everyone if everybody grandfathered," Stevens said.

There are at least two incentives, though, to send your kids to a new school.

First of all, the district will not transport students who attend a school outside of their attendance boundaries.

And the more students who stay at their schools, the more crowded they will be.

Both of these factors, as the district is well aware, should encourage parents to enroll their children in new schools.

Once the grandfathered students have graduated, the short-term crunch should go away, right? Not necessarily.

The plan the board approved only shifts about 90 students out of Dundee-Crown High School.

If enrollment continues to grow on the district's east side, the reduction in Dundee-Crown's student population could quickly be erased.

The district would then be forced to either house students in mobiles, a solution district officials are trying to get away from, or shift more students west.

Board members noted that despite the opposition of many affected parents to the boundary maps they ultimately chose, even these new boundaries would not do enough to reduce crowding at Dundee-Crown and Jacobs High School.

"We're not going to fix everything tonight no matter which plan we pick," board member Chris Stanton said Monday.

The board offered some hope for middle-schoolers this week, approving the sale of $45 million in bonds to finance middle-school renovations.

The bond sale should reduce crowding at the district's middle schools.

But between grandfathering and population pressures, the district may have to revisit the sometimes painful process, redrawing high school attendance boundaries sooner than it expected.