BASD committee will lay groundwork for new grade configuration
By Jason Arndt
Editor
While construction continues on the new Karcher Middle School, the Burlington Area School District Board of Education continues to move forward on other referendum objectives, including a new grade configuration plan.
The configuration involves converting the middle school to serve sixth through eighth grades, instead of the current seventh and eighth at Karcher and fifth and sixth Dyer Intermediate School.
Under the configuration, Dyer will become the district’s fifth elementary school and house the Montessori program. The change is targeted for implementation in the 2021-22 school year.
School board members will consider approving an attendance boundary study committee at a Feb. 24 meeting.
Superintendent Stephen Plank said Feb. 13 the committee, which will not exceed 25 people, will include staff members, administrators and family members tasked with reevaluating attendance boundaries at each of the five elementary schools.
“We have put together kind of a task force,” he said. “It is comprised of families from our elementary schools as well as staff from our elementary schools to talk about how do we go about doing this in a way that affects as few people as possible that comes with the need to utilize our buildings to full capacity and to be fiscally responsible.
“Those ended up being the three criteria.”
The district plans to have the committee meet six times starting in March, with two more meetings as necessary, to discuss criteria approved by the School Board on Jan. 13.
According to the criteria, committee members will consider projected enrollment and building utilization, affect on total number of students as well as financial obligations.
Drew Howick, of Howick Associates, will facilitate each committee meeting.
“Drew is affiliated with the Wisconsin Association of School Boards,” Plank said. “There are a lot of school board members throughout the state that know Drew because he is affiliated with the organization.”
Howick was also brought on to help the committee cope with boundary changes because the matter could bring some uneasiness among families.
“Oftentimes, schools are not doing this on their own, partly because it is so emotional,” Plank said. “Drew has been the go-to for people who had to do this for work.”
Additionally, Mark Roffers from MDRoffers Consulting will assess community demographics as part of the committee’s work.
Roffers will look at district boundaries, gathering data related to population, including age and how many children are in each neighborhood.
“The demographer’s purpose is to help us understand how we best achieve these numbers with the least amount of travel, with the least amount of impact on transportation and families and then provide all of that data to this committee, so they can make informed decisions,” Plank said.
Rebalancing enrollment
With reconfiguration comes rebalancing student enrollment at each of the five elementary schools.
The rebalancing, according to Plank, is because fifth grade students would be redistributed and spread out among five elementary schools instead of attending Dyer Intermediate School, which will become the fifth elementary school.
Sixth graders would attend the new Karcher Middle School.
“What becomes necessary for us is to look at Lyons, Winkler, Cooper, Waller and Dyer as our elementary schools,” Plank said. “As a result, we have to rebalance and redistribute kids that makes sense.”
To read the entire story see the Feb. 20 edition of the Burlington Standard Press.
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