St. Charles Dist. 303 comes to terms with lower enrollment

St. Charles Unit District 303 board members put their faith in population forecasts Monday night that show, at best, enrollment will top out at 12,000 students in coming years.

That's far less than the 13,500 population the district has housed in recent years.

Now with fewer students, school officials will begin examining the best ways to draw down the costly resources needed to teach them.

It's the school board that will decide what the best solutions are. Board members got a look at the projections the district staff and a committee of community members compiled to get a feel for exactly how many students will fill district classrooms over the next decade.

The numbers are based on local birth statistics and trend models to show how those babies, and new area residents, materialize into new students.

Births dropped with the recession and an aging local population. The bubbles of new residents popped when the new housing market tanked and the largest land parcels became developed.

In short, there's not going to be as much competition for lockers and desks as there has been.

"Growth can be projected to increase, but it's not going to get back to those late 2000s years," said enrollment committee member Rich Kitick. "We're going to have growth, but it's going to be very muted."

And that's not something District 303 residents are used to hearing.

School board member Kathy Hewell said residents who lived through the local population boom, including herself, have a hard time understanding that open space doesn't automatically mean new neighbors are coming.

"You drive around and see a field and think that one day that's going to be houses," Hewell said. "That's still the mindset. We know now, it's not going to happen."

District staff members are already meeting with architects to examine local schools and their potential to adjust to the population change. Superintendent Don Schlomann said the school board will likely be given at least four options come October or November.

One of those will almost certainly be to do nothing. The other options will involve the hard, but tax-saving, choices of redrawing attendance boundaries and closing or repurposing schools.

Schlomann promised there will be community meetings at all of the district's schools, except the two high schools, when it comes time to make those tough choices.

Decline: Options will likely include redrawing boundaries, closing schools