NORMAL – After a spring semester’s worth of meetings, three public forums, and numerous articles written and opinions expressed about it, Normal’s Unit 5 School Board members unanimously passed the proposed redistricting plan, during the group’s regular meeting held Aug. 26 at District headquarters.
The new redistricting plan will go into effect at the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year.
In explaining the District’s plan of deciding which students from which grade schools would go to which junior highs, and which junior high kids would wind up at one of the Town’s two high schools, School Superintendent Gary Niehaus attempted to lay out the thinking of the District.
“We wanted to do away with grandfathering,” Niehaus said in determining a reason for a student to be placed at a certain school. “We made the commitment to go (with) neighborhood schools.
“The Redistricting Committee took every single concern into consideration,” Niehaus said. He said now that the decision has been made, the district must turn its attention to having current “faculty and staff moved into place (rather than seeing) new teachers in new buildings.”
He called the plan the Board approved, “the best recommendation we could bring to (the Board) this evening.”
Also, to alleviate some parental concerns, Niehaus said the subject of attendance exceptions “is alive and well.”
Following the vote, Board Vice President John Puzauskas thanked the public for their input, on behalf of the 25-member Redistricting Committee.”We were not behind closed doors. We met with the public…the Committee worked really hard and stood up to the challenge. It’s the best recommendation.
“It meets District goals and supports the Unit 5 mission statement,” Puzauskas said.
“Six of our 7 Board members have children in the District,” Board member Mark Pritchett said. “To those people who say we didn’t have a stake in this, yes we did.”
The seventh board member, Gail Ann Briggs, has grown children.
Also, under the plan, About 34 student from Oakdale Elementary will stay at that school, rather than move to Parkside Elementary. Having those 34 students stay at Oakdale will permit special education classrooms to remain at Parkside schools and will prevent overcrowding.
“I think (the Board) did a good job of taking the recommendations of the (Redistricting) Committee,” Niehaus said, commenting on the Board’s vote.
“I felt the Committee did their due diligence to do the best they could do for the students in our school district,” Niehaus added.
Niehaus said there is a concern about keeping the enrollments of Normal’s two high schools as balanced as possible. He said NCHS enters the 2010-2011 school year with an enrollment of 1,988 students, while Normal West has 1,786 students.
Because of those numbers, “there is a need for us to balance that,” Niehaus said.
“Our growth just happens to be on (the Town’s) east side, so we know that Normal Community is just going to get bigger and bigger,” Niehaus said.
“To balance (the schools) now is a better deal than it would be if we allowed the schools to continue to grow (and then decide to redistrict).”
“I want to take care of the sophomores, juniors, and seniors of 2010, to make sure that they can stay at the high school of their choice,” Niehaus said.
Oakdale Students To Attend KingsleyJHS: Prior to the vote on redistricting being taken, Matt Cropper, president of Columbus, Ohio-based CropperGIS, the firm that conducted the redistricting survey for the district, informed Board members that his firm determined upon further investigation, that students at Oakdale Elementary School would best be served to feed into Kingsley Junior High School.
Oakdale students were, under the plan, originally supposed to advance to Parkside Junior High School.
Cropper indicated that a plan allowing students from Colene Hoose Elementary to funnel into Chiddix Junior High School failed when transportation issues prevented that option from being viable.
Parental Concerns Expressed One Last Time: Prior to the Board’s vote, members of the public got in one last round of comments concerning the redistricting plan.
Judy Jiles, 215 Doud, was concerned with parents’ concerns being misrepresented.
“Our concern is not whether (my child) will be a (Normal Community High School) Ironmen or a (Normal West High) Wildcat,” Jiles said. “Our concern was that she is only going to class with six percent of her peers.”
“The true problem is that only a small percentage of students at Chiddix Junior High will go to Normal West,” said Pete Halter, 322 Raleigh Ct., in comments he made to the Board.
Halter said he would prefer to see students who live in the Pleasant Hills subdivision, who currently attend CJHS be advanced to Normal West. As the plan stands now, those kids would advance to NCHS.
“Consider how you would feel if nine out of 10 friends you were with were kept out of your daily life,” Halter said, posing a question which he said describes a fate awaiting these students.