Incoming kindergarten students who would have gone to Winnetka’s Crow Island School this fall will instead go either to Greeley or Hubbard Woods elementary schools, School District 36 board members decided Tuesday.
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Sending incoming Crow Island kindergartners to the other schools will ease overcrowding at Crow Island, the school board decided, freeing up two classrooms at the Willow Road school and sending the students to schools where enrollment is far lower.
The plan will provide temporary relief while the district looks for long-term solutions to its population problems, board members said before unanimously approving the recommendation their enrollment balancing committee made Jan. 17. Board member Betsy Owens was not at the Tuesday meeting for the final vote.
“We owe kids across the district excellence and space and experiences, not to have pieces of their day impacted because there’s just not space for them to do more,” board member Dana Crumley told the large meeting audience at Hubbard Woods.
In a short presentation to the board during a working session before its regular meeting, Assistant Supt. Daniel Ryan noted that Crow Island had 380 students and 77 staff members, compared with 244 students and 51 staff at Hubbard Woods and 222 students and 50 staff members at Greeley.
Many district residents at the meeting opposed the decision, particularly Crow Island parents who said the district should have had a long-term strategy in place before choosing a short-term tactic.
Opponents on Jan. 24 also repeated charges many have made at previous board and committee meetings: that the board’s May 2016 decision to provide extended day kindergarten across the district helped exacerbate Crow Island’s overcrowding, and also disregarded advice from its kindergarten committee to address facility constraints before starting an extended day program.
Moving kindergartners for one year, then sending them back to Crow Island only to risk having them moved again if the board decides on a long-term population imbalance solution like redrawing school lines, is unfair to the youngest district students, parents said.
“The committee has completely disregarded the community’s comments,” Oak Street parent Stacy Burgoon said. Burgoon, who said an online petition asking the board to reject the committee recommendation has more than 300 signatures, also asked that the three school board members who served on the committee – Crumley, Kristen Hertel and Dawn Livingston – abstain from the board decision since, she said, it would be a conflict of interest for them to vote.
Oak Street parent Margaret Reynolds said another petition, from parents of incoming and future Crow Island kindergartners, had reached 80 signatures and also opposed moving kindergarten classes and their two classroom teachers. It could negatively impact 71 children, she said.
Some parents asked that the board instead add a second temporary classroom to Crow Island to handle overcrowding until a long-term solution is found. Others said they had not been kept in the information loop as the board considered options.
Board members pushed back before voting. The board and enrollment balancing committee have met a combination of 27 times, Board President Kendra Wallace said; 90 people have spoken at those meetings, and the committee and board have gotten 135 emails about the issue since the district started considering it in 2015, she added.
Hertel acknowledged that extended day kindergarten classes might exacerbate overcrowding, but that even without it Crow Island would be overcrowded, she said, and that the district chose extended day kindergarten because officials decided that the benefits of a longer kindergarten outweighed the costs.
Responding to parents who worried about kindergarten students having to take buses to school, Hertel said the district has many household addresses where students can’t walk to their neighborhood school.
Livingston told listeners she’d changed her mind “a dozen times” since studying the issue, but supported moving kindergarten temporarily. She promised that kindergarten would eventually return to Crow Island.
“This process has been exhausting,” she said. “I’m a Crow Island parent and in an ideal world, there would be no way I’d want to move kindergarten.”
“People have said the benefits (of moving kindergarten) are marginal,” Livingston said. “It’s 70 less students in the building.”
Twitter: @pioneer_kathy
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