Schools
Declining Enrollment Forces School for Gifted to Close
Da Vinci Academy in Elgin draws students from the Tri-Cities. The school will close at the end of this school year.
ELGIN, IL - The Da Vinci Academy in Elgin will close at the end of this school year due to declining enrollment.
The private school for gifted children, located at 37W080 Hopps Road, opened in 2000 and draws its 81 students primarily from Geneva, St. Charles, Batavia and Bartlett but also gets students from Elgin, Hoffman Estates and Naperville, the Daily Herald reports. The peak enrollment for the school, which serves pre-kindergarten through 8th grade, was 132 students during the 2005-06 school year.
The enrollment has been dropping off by about 10 students per year and school officials said donations, as well as a change in leadership and renewed efforts in marketing and advertising, has not been able to get those numbers up, according to the Daily Herald.
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“It’s not sustainable when you are relatively small,” school board president Jeff Martin, of Geneva, told the Daily Herald. “As we went through the recession, we saw a lot of families qualifying for more financial aid. The current school board decided there was no way the school could remain open.”
The school is set to close in May at the end of the 2016-17 school year.
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Photo caption: The Da Vinci Academy, located on the far western edge of Elgin, will close at the end of this school year. Photo credit: GoogleMaps
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