The new Elgin School District U46 plan to provide all-day kindergarten and build additions to three elementary schools foresees no tax increase. The plan drew almost entirely positive reactions from board members and residents when it was explained Tuesday at a board of education committee meeting.
Interim Superintendent Kenneth Arndt, a part-time employee who rarely comments at public meetings, broke his silence Tuesday to tell the board facilities committee that offering all-day kindergarten to all “is going to give our kids an opportunity to be on the same page as kids in the surrounding area.”
“We say we need to be investing in our children at the youngest age,” Arndt said. “Now we’re going to be walking the talk.”
District CEO Tony Sanders said that nationwide 77 percent of kindergartners now attend school all day. Locally, he said, almost every school district bordering U46 — Burlington Central District 301, Algonquin/Dundee/Hampshire-area District 300, St. Charles District 303 and Barrington District 220 — already offer all-day kindergarten.
Sanders said that after Chief Operating Officer Jeff King, hired demographer Bruce Silva and the U46 Citizens Advisory Council Enrollment and Facilities Committee proposed their attendance-boundary-change plan in May, it began to bother him that it included converting Illinois Park Early Education Center into an elementary school and that it could not provide for all-day kindergarten except at the handful of locations it is offered already.
When Illinois Park was converted from an elementary school to a preschool center in 2004, Sanders said, that was for a reason — its location at the busy intersection of Wing Street and McLean Boulevard was dangerous and the district needed more space for preschool classes on Elgin’s West Side. And both those reasons still exist, Sanders said.
Sanders said he asked King to figure out what could be done to keep Illinois Park as a pr4school center and add space for all-day kindergarten at every school. To accommodate that, King figured out, 10 classrooms would have to be added at Highland Elementary School on Elgin’s northwest side, 10 classrooms added at Coleman Elementary School on Elgin’s northeast side and six classrooms added at Laurel Hill Elementary School in Hanover Park.
Sanders and King said the construction would cost an estimated $9.3 million. It also would require hiring some 60 more employees at a cost of about $5 million per year.
But on the other hand, they said, the cost of busing students would go down more than $1 million a year because part-time kindergartners would no longer have to be moved around at lunchtime and fewer kindergartners would have to be moved away from their neighborhood schools. Also, getting rid of 28 mobile classrooms would save $238,000 a year in maintenance costs. And the additional all-day kindergarten students would bring in an additional $3.9 million a year in revenue from increased state aid, increased federal school lunch subsidies and increased student registration fees.
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King estimated that, including construction costs, the changes would pay for themselves in about 18 years.
The changes would increase net spending by $4.65 million this fiscal year and $6.9 million in 2016-2017, they estimated. But Sanders said those costs could be covered using money from the district’s contingency, equipment and capital funds, plus $2 million from the staffing budget, without having to increase the tax levy that will be collected next summer.
Sanders and King also recommend that the school board consider selling the mothballed Streamwood Elementary School or Woodland Heights Elementary School, both in Streamwood, and selling some vacant land around Hawk Hollow Elementary School in Bartlett.
Board Member Sue Kerr asked whether the empty Streamwood schools could be reopened instead of building new space on existing schools. King said that would require using so many buses that any cost saving probably would disappear. He said busing children from Elgin’s West Side to Streamwood also would go against the philosophy of having children go to school close to where they live..
Roger Wallace, a parent volunteer from Bartlett, is co-chair of the advisory council’s enrollment and facilities committee. That 40-member committee’s recommendations for attendance-boundary changes were largely superseded by the new proposal from Sanders and King after the committee spent more than a year studying school capacities, enrollments and attendance areas. But Wallace said he looks at the change of direction as a positive thing, not a waste of his group’s effort.
“My only grievance is that this didn’t happen sooner,” Wallace said. “This new plan will be moving fewer kids, will be keeping kids where they should be and will be a better long-term solution.”
Wallace said the committee, made up of volunteer parents and residents, looked from the beginning at the possibility of adding all-day kindergarten. “But we were always limited because we were not allowed to consider making additions to any buildings,” he said.
Wallace said the committee finally proposed converting Illinois Park back into a kindergarten-through-sixth-grade school, because various scenarios to shift attendance boundaries on the northwest side of Elgin without adding on to any buildings always amounted to just shifting children from one crowded school to an adjoining also-crowded school.
Asked why the administrators want to build an addition onto Highland rather than the more crowded adjoining Hillcrest Elementary School, King said Highland has a large amount of flat, empty land. Because Hilllcrest is built into a hillside, as its name implies, building there would cost much more, he said.
King said Coleman and Laurel Hill also were chosen for building additions because of their supplies of flat, empty land.
Sanders said enrolling their child in half-day kindergarten rather than full-day would remain an option for each family.
Wallace also noted that about half the boundary changes in Sanders’ and King’s new plan are the same or similar to those proposed in May by his committee. The advisory committee will consider the new plan and look at the proposed new attendance boundary lines when it meets Tuesday, Sept. 15.
Sanders said a number of townhall meetings to explain the plan and solicit comment will be held this fall.