‘It’s amazing’: Glen Ellyn District 41 offers full-day kindergarten with 12-classroom center

Treelike columns anchor an arrival plaza and set the theme for the new Glen Ellyn Elementary District 41 Kindergarten Center, complete with its own koala mascot.

The tree house-inspired building is so kindergarten-friendly that it features a built-in slide in a multipurpose room that brings blue skies in. On the walls are birds perched on tree branches and a tree-hugging koala. Throughout the center, collage-style murals are at kid height and look plucked from an illustrated children’s book.

“I don't know that there is an adjective strong enough to say how excited I am for this to come to fruition,” Superintendent Jeff McHugh said.

The 12-classroom center has allowed District 41 to offer all-day kindergarten with the new school year and ahead of a state deadline.

Legislation signed by Gov. JB Pritzker in 2023 requires districts to provide full-day kindergarten beginning with the 2027-28 school year. Long before the requirement, District 41 studied how to accommodate a full-day program and how to pay for it.

Officials ultimately decided to serve full-day kindergarten students across the district in one, standalone center on the campus of Churchill Elementary School in Glen Ellyn. The district funded the $28.8 million project using reserves. There’s still a half-day option for families.

“When you have a full-day program, you need more classrooms for that,” said McHugh, who took the helm of the district last year. “So this allowed us to have both full-day without doing any boundary changes or anything major to the other elementary schools. It actually created more space in the other schools that we have now that they don't have multiple kindergarten classrooms.”

The district also needed, as McHugh put it, a “principal on steroids” for the center because “we're building a school from scratch.”

He didn’t have to look far for that leader.

A full day of kindergarten

Sarah Rodriguez was previously the principal of the district’s Abraham Lincoln Elementary before becoming the kindergarten center’s first principal.

Her combination of knowing the district and young people with her ability to “get everything together and problem solve, it's a huge reason why it's been a success,” McHugh said.

Rodriguez has taught kindergarten and first grade during her career.

“I think that early elementary has always been my love, and it was the perfect opportunity,” she said. “We've been waiting for a full day for a long time.”

Programming includes an hour of math daily, 150 minutes of literacy daily, an hour for lunch and recess, social-emotional learning, or SEL, throughout the day, along with social studies and science.

Full-day kindergarteners also have 30 minutes of purposeful play a day and PE five days a week. There is also 30 minutes of either art, music or digital media daily.

“For the SEL component and for the kids being able to learn how to socialize together and communicate, we have so much time for that, and we can really slow down during the academics and take our time,” Rodriguez said.

“And also the kids have more time to interact with each other during the day in purposeful ways. So we're really hoping that we get to see that in first grade, they have many more of those skills with their peers than they would in a typical program.”

‘Growing together’

The center currently serves 215 full-day kindergarteners. A dual language program, which is housed in Churchill, enrolls 36 full-day kindergarteners. The remaining 86 kindergarteners are half-day students at the elementary schools.

McHugh said one of the reasons educators encouraged full day is “it gives more opportunities for the kids — academic, social, emotional, physical, just for that development.”

In the center’s hallways, nook benches offer a spot for a teacher to have one-on-one time with a student. A library invites kindergarteners to “adventure time” and to read such books as “How Many Jelly Beans?”

The tree house theme extends to a new kindergarten playground with a climbing wall and petite tree stumps. There’s also an outdoor amphitheater space.

“You see the kids coming to school, and they're jumping off the bus, and they're so excited to be back … It’s amazing what we're able to provide,” Rodriguez said, “and we're just learning and growing together.”