The committee charged with finding temporary ways to correct student population imbalances at Winnetka’s Crow Island, Hubbard Woods and Greeley elementary schools has crossed redistricting – the complete redrawing of school attendance boundaries – off its list of potential short-term solutions for the 2017-2018 school year.
Instead, they’ll look at four other options, committee members decided at the end of a lengthy Nov. 29 meeting:
* Moving all kindergarten programming out of high-population Crow Island and into lower-population Hubbard Woods and Greeley;
* Moving a smaller number of kindergartners from Crow Island to the other two schools;
* Moving all fourth grade classes out of Crow Island to Skokie School, which now houses only fifth and sixth graders;
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* Moving no students, but adding two more temporary classrooms at Crow Island, bringing its complement of modular units to four.
Before it narrows that list further and make a final recommendation to the Winnetka Public Schools District 36 board sometime in January, the committee will hold three community meetings to get more feedback from district residents, according to committee project leader Maureen Hager. All three will be held at Carleton Washburne School: Dec. 7 from 9-10:30 a.m., and Dec. 14 and Jan. 5, both from 7-9 p.m.
On Jan. 12, the committee will meet again, Hager said.
The committee’s work is limited to finding short-term solutions to uneven school enrollment for the 2017-2018 year, she said. She said long-term and permanent solutions will be taken up, potentially by a new group or one with new and old members, as a second phase of work after the school board makes its short-term decision, which should be by March.
Close to 50 residents and district staff attended the Nov. 29 meeting, which was also held at Washburne. Before the committee began working with consultant Matthew Cropper to cut the number of potential options, more than a dozen people, many of them Crow Island parents, told committee members to abandon the idea of redistricting as a short-term solution to population imbalances.
Elm Street parent Ruth Jennings said redistricting can hurt children’s emotional and social health. She asked the committee to choose moving kindergarten students from Crow Island either to Greeley or someplace else.
“Winnetka has never redistricted its grade schools. That would be off-brand,” Garland Avenue resident Sonja Smith said. “Redistricting is a knee-jerk reaction that would build animosity and resentment.”
Greeley School parent Tara Maher of Sheridan Road said she was willing to go without the extended day kindergarten approved last May by the board if that solved population imbalances.
But committee members, including Hager, said the imbalances were neither caused by the kindergarten decision, nor limited to Crow Island.
“I think our community is understanding that something needs to be done, that it is a district-wide issue, and not just a situation caused by the adoption of extended kindergarten,” Hager said Dec. 1.
Some residents at the Nov. 29 meeting made similar statements. Church Road resident Christopher Eilers warned, “If you think of this as a Crow Island problem, that’s an inherent flaw. This is not a room of Crow Island or Hubbard Woods or Greeley parents. We’re Winnetka parents.”
In June, District 36 installed two temporary classrooms at Crow Island, which District Superintendent Trisha Kocanda said that month had an enrollment of about 390 students, compared to enrollments of roughly 240 students each at Greeley and Hubbard Woods.
In July, the district school board hired McKibben Demographics of South Carolina, and Ohio-based Cropper GIS, to study district demographics and student capacity at all three elementary schools. Discussions about the company’s findings kicked into high gear starting in September.
Information on the enrollment balancing project is available on the District 36 website, at www.winnetka36.org/enrollment-balancing-project-overview.
Twitter: @pioneer_kathy