District 202 Board Of Education Approves New Attendance Zones

PLAINFIELD, IL — As District 202 prepares to move toward a full-day kindergarten model for any family who wants it in the fall, the Board of Education approved new attendance zones for the upcoming school year Monday night that district officials believe is best for the district as a whole.

The changes will affect 997 current elementary students within District 202 along with 226 middle school students and 108 high school students. The changes will impact about 5.3 percent of the district’s 25,100 students, district officials announced. District officials had planned to unveil the new attendance zones in December, but the project was delayed by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The district said that they hoped to disrupt the smallest number of students as possible. The changes are impacted by population growth within Plainfield that dates back to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when new schools were opening every year. This is the first district-wide zone change that has been made since 2008 when the Great Recession halted growth within the district, officials said.

The new attendance zones will “rebalance” enrollments across the district and will help to populate Wallin Oaks, which is the district’s newest elementary school. The changes will provide room for the district to provide all-day kindergarten for anyone who wants it within the district’s boundaries, officials said.

The new plan will also minimize the need to move special education programs every year among school buldings because of limited space and allows for student transportation to run more efficiently.

“These changes do exactly what we wanted and needed to do: they meet a long-standing community priority of providing full-day kindergarten, stabilize locations for our specialized elementary special education programs, and make sure our system runs as efficiently as possible,” District 202 Superintendent Dr. Lane Abrell said in a statement issued by the district.

“This plan is good for our students, our parents, us as a district and our entire community.”

Nearly all of the affected students will go to school in their current “House” – the internal feeder system used within District 202. The system assigns certain elementary schools to certain middle schools and ultimately, to certain high schools.

Students moving from Lincoln Elementary (a Red House) to Wallin Oaks will then go to one of the “Red House” middle schools and then attend Plainfield North High School, which is the school assigned as a “Red House” high school.

“We know changing schools is sometimes not easy, and is just one more thing following the pandemic, but the reality is, this work started well before the pandemic when we decided to build Wallin Oaks as part of our full-day kindergarten plan,” Abrell said.

“In my 35-plus years I have found that by and large, students are incredibly resilient and come to love their new schools. Our teachers will certainly do everything they can to make their new students feel welcome and supported.”