District 34 Board Decides On Overcrowding Solution

After months of meetings, hearings and discussion,  Board of Education unanimously approved a measure to address at its regular meeting Monday, March 7.

In 2001, District 34 had an enrollment of about 3,700 students. A five-year projection puts the district's population at just over 5,000 students in 2015.

 The plan calls for:

• Increasing class size for 1st through 5th grades by two students
• Increasing class size for kindergarten classes by one student
• No mobile classrooms at 

If the district had remained at status quo with class sizes, the district's budget deficit would have been $10.2 million over four years, explained Brett Clark, executive director of communications and strategic planning.

However, reducing class sizes won't have any additional costs and will reduce the deficit by about $3.9 million, bringing the projected budget gap to about $6.3 million over four years.

The solution doesn't require boundary shifts at all, as many parents and committee members were.

The board did not adopt a recommendation from the district Boundary Committee that would have moved a mobile classroom to Lyon Elementary, though the plan it did approve is very similar.

"It's very close," Clark added. "The difference from the boundary committee is that kindergarten was at 20 [students]. The boundary committee also recommended that we move a mobile [classroom] over to Lyon.

"This does not have that in there because we increased [kindergarten] class size," Clark said. "So we're also reducing expenditures that way -- by not moving a mobile over to Lyon."

Administrators will also cut $306,000 from its own 2012 departmental budget to help with deficit, Clark said.

Going through the process

The decision came Monday after the 25-member boundary committee had been working on the issue since October. Both Clark and District Superintendent Gerald Hill praised the amount of community involvement.

"I'm glad we went through the process," said Clark, who was also co-chair of the boundary committee. "We engaged the community. ... I think that by going through the process we did, more people understand the challenges we're facing."

Hill said it was a long process that involved many people. In, district administrators described the issues of federal and state budget cuts alongside the sky-rocketing enrollment as a "perfect storm." 

"It brought people to the table with about a dozen ideas," Hill said Monday, noting the board received feedback from the finance committee, facilities committee and the administration. "Now we know there's a lot more work to do, but having an open and transparent process and collaborative process allowed us to really tackle the challenges." 

Correction: The original version of this story contained inaccuracies regarding the number of members on the boundary committee and the cost of the approved plan to the district.