The District 205 School Board were presented with a handful of options regarding the building study conducted by Legat Architects at Monday night’s meeting.
Five options presented included the combing of the junior high at Lombard and the closure of Churchill, creating attendance centers and eliminating neighborhood schools, or creating a hybrid of several options.
In the end the board threw out two options, one that saw no major changes and another that saw the district change completely to attendance centers – leaving three options that left the neighborhood schools intact, and two that were a hybrid of options.
Superintendent Dr. John Asplund said the district would be seeking handwritten feedback from several locations.
“We would like to provide a forum for people to provide written feedback,” says Asplund. “We would like to be able to put out a Google form, and then put something in other places for people who don’t have Internet…for people to be able to write handwritten input for whatever they want.”
All options still on the table included closing Churchill, and King schools and combining the junior high into Lombard after some additions, and creating neighborhood schools for K-5th grades at Steele, Nielson, and Willard.
All options included a moving seventh and eighth grade to the high school building, which Jeff Sandberg from Legat Architects explained to the board how that would work.
“The two populations are going to mix because they’re completely different; a 7th grader and a 12th grader is [sic] completely different,” says Sandberg. “We understand the challenges with that. We’ve got to understand that we need to create separate entrances. We need to split them apart. We need to keep that difference inbetween them. We need to share the efficiencies with staffing and resources.”
The school board also discussed creating feedback channels on the three options still available for parents and community members to give administration and board members input on what they like and don’t like about aspects of each option.
The board spent a lot of time discussing the high school – which would see the seventh and eighth grades added to it, with separate entrances being installed to eliminate interaction of the age ranges.
(File photo)
