Dupage Policy Journal

West Chicago Elementary School officials recently received a presentation on changes in the school district that have been recommended following an enrollment and population trend study predicting how the future will impact District 33. 

“Last year, the facility committee spent a great deal of time studying preschool and just the facility needs of the district, and at the end of that prioritized air conditioning as well as the preschool facilities,” said Superintendent Kristina Davis at the Jan. 19 board of eduction meeting.

According to the presentation at the meeting, the overall population in West Chicago plateaued in the mid 2000s and stayed about the same since. There is a decline in the birth rate and the elementary school population has aged slowly and continuously has declined in the West Chicago area as the 60-plus population has increased. Due to a lack of new housing development and no strong migration in the area, the district can predict they will continue to have lower preschool and kindergarten classes for the next several years before experiencing modest increases.

The district has been working to find a way to organize, as the setup for the elementary students and preschool has the district leasing some buildings and putting young kids on long bus rides to get to district buildings. The preschool populations are spread among rented buildings and enrollment throughout the district has shown decline.

“There wasn't any rental space in the community and there's a lot of creative ideas that it wasn't really optimal to be spreading the kids out again,” Davis said. “If you spread them across the district and classrooms across the district, that still is time on buses and a very disjointed program because it is important for teachers to be together to collaborate. We talked a lot about collaboration and then the feasibility of a building that's $25 million at this time really did not seem like the best choice, given the fact that we still had a very looming presence of not having buildings with the environment in terms of air conditioning. So the end of that, as you recall, we did prioritize air conditioning, but you also asked us to continue to research and look at ways that we could continue to support the preschool and come up with some other solutions.”

The solution proposed to the school board was to take Pioneer Elementary and turn it into the district preschool building. It currently holds local kindergarten through fifth grade. Pioneer is losing enrollment like all other elementary buildings, but also have almost completely lost their monolingual population as most classes are under 15 students. Beginning next year, they plan to send incoming kindergarten students to other buildings and slowly disperse the rest of the students so they can use the building for preschool, which will solve most facility and declining enrollment issues that are coming.