District 300 board to vote Tuesday on boundary changes

Students attending several Carpentersville schools likely will be moving to new buildings starting next school year.

The Community Unit District 300 school board Tuesday night is expected to approve attendance boundary changes affecting Carpentersville Middle School and five elementary schools.

Officials conducted three town hall meetings last month followed by a communitywide phone survey earlier this month to gather input on two possible boundary options.

"Of the 524 responses, 374 people favored option one, 140 favored option two, and 11 people had no preference," district spokesman Anthony McGinn said.

Administrators are recommending Option No. 1:

• Parkview, Meadowdale, Golfview, Perry and Lakewood becoming prekindergarten through fifth-grade schools.

• Carpentersville Middle School becoming a sixth- through eighth-grade building, taking in sixth-graders from Lakewood.

• Lakewood becoming a prekindergarten through fifth-grade school.

• Parkview, Meadowdale, Golfview and Perry adding the fifth-graders who no longer attend Lakewood.

Presently, Carpentersville Middle School is the only middle school in the district that does not house sixth- through eighth-graders, while Lakewood serves only fifth- and sixth-graders.

District 300 moved some administrative employees out of Carpentersville Middle School in January into the new district headquarters in Algonquin. Officials propose converting those former offices and several old classrooms at Carpentersville Middle School into roughly seven to 10 new classrooms to accommodate sixth-graders from Lakewood School. The boundary changes also would free up space at elementary schools affected by the adoption of full-day kindergarten districtwide this school year, officials said.

Officials said lowering the student population at the five elementary buildings would create more space for ancillary services and potential future growth. Enrollment at those schools for the 2016-17 school year would drop as follows: Perry, goes from 610 to 544; Parkview, from 519 to 408; Meadowdale, from 439 to 422; Golfview, from 667 to 638; and Lakewood, from 872 to 569.

Superintendent Fred Heid has said the goal is to maintain the "integrity of neighborhoods."

The way the schools currently are structured, students must go through five different buildings from prekindergarten through high school.

District architects are figuring out the costs of renovating Carpentersville Middle School.

The school board meeting begins 6:30 p.m. at the District 300 Central Office, 2550 Harnish Drive, Algonquin.