WNIJ News Director Jenna Dooley (JD): The Harlem School District’s board is weighing some major changes that would reshape their schools and many parents and staff members are not happy. WNIJ education reporter Peter Medlin drove up to Machesney Park earlier this past week for one of their community listening sessions.
Before we get into the changes, can you tell us a little bit about the Harlem School District?
Peter Medlin, WNIJ education reporter: Harlem is up in Machesney Park & Loves Park area. It’s a huge district, about 6,000 students, pretty high percentage of low-income students as well.
JD: Okay, so what are the big changes the school board is considering?
PM: It’s a lot. First and foremost, they’re thinking about closing two of the district’s eight elementary schools. That would be Maple Elementary and Olson Park.
They may significantly cut early childhood services. Their early childhood programs currently serve 360 general ed students -- one of the proposals would cut that down to 80.
Obviously, with both of those scenarios -- some staff would lose their jobs.
Another change is that they’d move from a traditional “neighborhood school” model to “grade banding.”
So, instead of attending the school you live closest to all the way through elementary school, students would switch schools every two years. So, buildings would be just for K-1, 2-3, and 4-5.
This isn’t unique, there are other school districts in northern Illinois like Rochelle that do this, but it’s certainly very different from the way things work now.
JD: Why does the Harlem board say these changes are necessary?
PM: They’re running into a problem a lot of schools have to reckon with these days: enrollment is going down, and costs are going up.
The district says they’re working under a $3.1 million-dollar budget deficit.
So, take early childhood, for example. That’s primarily funded by the state through grants. Over the past five years or so, the amount they get has stayed pretty much the same, and the district says their early childhood costs now exceed their grant allocation by over $750,000 a year.
They’ve also talked about unstable tax revenue.
Aside from the financial part of this, they say this new “grade-banding” system would keep staffing, services, and class sizes consistent from school to school.
JD: And you said parents and teachers, generally, aren’t happy about these proposed changes?
PM: No, at the meeting I went to this past week, there were maybe 25-30 people who gave public comments -- most of them were either parents, teachers at Harlem, or both. And it was unanimous that everyone was upset about this. There were even more people at the previous meeting and the district got dozens of emails -- I would be shocked if the sentiments were much different there.
JD: So, what are their biggest issues with this?
PM: Well, I think we should split that into two buckets. One: there are the changes themselves that people don’t like or disagree with. But two, it’s how the changes have been presented and just the timing of all this.
Let’s start with that: this plan was presented to the board on November 15th and then they planned to vote on it on December 15th -- exactly one month later -- and then have all of these massive changes go into effect next school year.
I talked to a few Harlem teachers at the hearing. These are early childhood teachers at the district whose jobs might be on the chopping block and they say they heard about these proposals pretty much at the same time as the rest of the public.
Here’s Katie Fowler, she’s an early childhood teacher at Parker Center.
“I think we were all pretty dismayed," she said. "Yeah, it was a lot of disappointment and a lot of frustration and just, like, lack of transparency."
At the meeting, the board did delay the vote to reconsider the plans, but they’re still hoping to make a decision in January -- so it’s not a long delay.
Now to dive into the problems people voiced about the plans themselves. One, obviously, school closures are really tough. Last year, Belvidere was considering closing one of their elementary schools and the community showed up in huge numbers to oppose it and the district ended up backing down.
I was thinking about that at the meeting this week where people were baring their heart about how much Maple and Olson Park mean to them and their kids and the whole neighborhood.
There were also tons of concerns about students switching schools every two years. They’re worried that it’ll be a lot harder for students to build relationships with teachers and school staff when they’re transitioning schools so many times, they’re concerned that’ll then affect academic performance.
It could make transportation much more complicated for many Harlem families. That could make parent engagement much more challenging and just make the schools less of an important neighborhood space.
Of course, people are also worried about early childhood getting scaled back so much and how that’ll impact students socially and academically. Some art classes and advanced programs could be hit by this too. I could go on. I’ll be keeping tabs on it as things are finalized or not in the new year.
The Harlem School Board will be talking about the changes at their board meeting on Monday, December 15 at 6 p.m.
