Realigning the elementary school boundaries was discussed at Monday night’s District 205 School Board Meeting.
District 205’s Assistant Superintendent for Finance and Operations Jennifer Hamm presented a new piece of software to the board called 5 Maps, that would be utilized to restructure the boundaries in the future.
Hamm says that the new software would analyze student enrollment and demographic trends by region
She also said that there were thousands of configurations for drawing up boundaries for the elementary schools, and would have options for the board to look at.
No action was taken on this or on the next item, review of the possible calendar for the 2018/19 school year.
Superintendent Dr. John Asplund brought the board a tentative school calendar on first reading for the board to look at and give suggestions to.
Asplund called the school calendar a radical departure from previous ones, “You’ll see we would start school significantly later which would necessitate ending first semester after winter break. And then there is no spring break in there,” he said. “And then the third one is that instead of putting the five emergency days at the end of the year, adding them to the last five Fridays of the year.”
When asked, Asplund said that school start times would remain the same, saying that the district had enough to do right now and that it wasn’t on the list yet. He added that there was research out there to support the need to change but it was further down the road.
Board members seem to indicate that spring break was deemed important and that they’d like to see them added.
Additionally it was announced at the meeting that Amy Neilson was hired to take over as head administrator at King Elementary. She formerly taught at Farmington, and at Lombard Middle School. Neilson was in attendance at Monday night’s meeting.
