D303 Board Approves Grade-Level Center Plan; Parents Split on Future

To one District 303 board member, the vote has created an “anomaly” within the elementary school system. Another board member believes the decision to merge students from two elementary school will split part of the community.

And yet another said that the members of the communities should come together regardless and follow through on the decision they made.

On Thursday, the board voted 5-2 to enact a proposal to take students from Davis and Richmond elementary schools and form two new grade-level centers—one housing kindergarten through second grades and the other, grades three through five. District officials say this will solve several issues with the two schools and provide more focus on literacy for the younger children and 40 extra minutes of class time for the older students.

In a separate vote that ended unfavorably to many parents concerned about the plan, the board decided not to allow parents in the combined neighborhoods to “opt out” of the new schools.

What this means for parents

For many parents who spoke before the vote Thursday night, the proposal is seen as a wanted, if potentially difficult, change.

“It’s not a perfect world. I believe we should do what we can with what we have,” said Tina Lappa, a Richmond parent for 10 years. Before the vote, she told the board that she believe the community would be “ripped apart” if the plan wasn’t approved.

One Davis parent, Patrick Shannon, offered a larger view of the problem and talked about how the United States compared to other industrialized countries in education. Shannon said that he has had exposure to other countries’ educational systems in his work travels and supported the proposal.

“This curriculum is the norm for their peers in the rest of the industrialized world,” he said.

Three votes actually were made during the special board meeting. The third one was the approval of a motion to allow families currently living in the combined Davis and Richmond neighborhoods to come back to the new grade-level schools, if they had previously sent their children elsewhere.

During the past two months, District 303 administration had explained what the plan means for students.

Starting next school year, Davis would become a primary school for kindergarten through second-grade students from both neighborhoods. The emphasis there would be on literacy education. Officials say the benefit of having only students from those grade levels will allow them to focus on the literacy education. Richmond becomes an intermediary school for third through fifth grades. With a longer school day, this center would focus on foreign language and science instruction with the use of new technology.

Officials have said that they want to eventually roll out the program throughout  all elementary schools in the district.

Some parents had the hope that, should the main proposal pass, they would still have the ability to opt out.

One parent group has retained St. Charles attorney Timothy Dwyer, who addressed the board before the vote about his review of the proposal and potential complications with No Child Left Behind Act rules.

“The proposed plan for the school district does not comply with the Act … There is very good chance that will challenge that in court,” Dwyer said.