By Jennifer Eisenbart
Editor
With a facilities study looming in the near future, the answer the Burlington Area School District School Board got on its grade configuration study wasn’t what School Board President Jim Bousman wanted Monday night.
“I have to say, I’m a little disappointed,” Bousman said. “I was hoping we’d be able to drive this from the education aspect, not the facilities aspect.”
After an ad hoc committee spent the last two months exploring grade configuration options for BASD, the results were presented by Karcher Middle School Principal Jill Oelslager at Monday night’s Long-Range Planning Committee meeting.
But rather than focus on making a recommendation that would fit the current facilities, Oelslager said the ad hoc committee decided to simply look at the pros and cons of each options – and then let the facilities study fill in the blanks.
But while Bousman expressed some disappointment in the lack of recommendations – although he did take the chance to thank Oelslager and the committee for all of the work – there were some definite options to come out of the process.
The committee studied seven different options, but three seem to be at the forefront right now: keeping the current configuration, and then shifting either one or both of grades 5 and 6 to different buildings.
BASD staff members – a mix of custodians, teachers, secretaries, teachers and administration were asked to rank which options they preferred, and those three were at the top of their list.
According to that ranking, the top option is having grades 4K-5 at the elementary level, grades 6-8 at the middle school and then continue as a 9-12 high school.
The next best option is going to a grade-school format for grades 4K-6, keeping the middle school at grades 7-8 and the high school at 9-12.
The third option is keeping the status quo – 4K to fourth grade in the four elementary schools, grades 5-6 at Dyer Intermediate, grades 7-8 at Karcher Middle School and grades 9-12 at the high school.
However, the current configuration doesn’t take into account two facts raised Monday night. For one, the committee discovered in the course of its research that the fewer transitions a student has to go through – from one school to the next – the better.
That would indicate a traditional grade school format – 4K to grade 8, then grades 9-12 at the high school – would potentially work the best. However, as Oelslager explained, there are a number of potential cons to that setup in BASD, including teachers being forced to straddle a large number of grades and potential school library resources being strained.
The other consideration with the current grade configuration comes back to what the district hopes to address the facilities study. What is now Karcher Middle School is the former high school, and the top floor of the school is, essentially, shuttered now.
The school is also likely at the top of the list at a number of expensive repairs.
BASD’s newest schools are the current high school and Winkler Elementary, which was opened in 2000. Every other school is at least 20-30 years older.
The results of facilities study by Plunkett Raysich are expected in the next month or so. That company handled the design for both the new high school and Winkler Elementary School, as well as Dyer Intermediate and portions of Karcher.
Other grade configuration options that were discussed included schools for grades 4K-6 and then housing grades 7-12 at the high school, a specialty academy set-up (fine arts, STEM, etc.), and multiple transitions – meaning grades 4K and kindergarten, grades 1-3, grades 4-6, grades 7-8 and then 9-12.
The committee also looked into configurations for the district’s Montessori options, and announced the results of a survey question posted to parents during online school registration this past summer.
Parents were asked their feelings with the current configuration only, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best.
More than 1,100 of the 2,600 responses were scored 5 (very satisfied), while another 600-plus responses were 4 (somewhat satisfied).
Another 600 or so responses fell at 3 – or neutral. Those three answers accounted for about 93 percent of the survey answers, but BASD Assistant Superintendent Connie Zinnen said they did not want to overload the parents with options at the end of a long registration process.
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