The Pre-K program was housed at the Main Street Park District Facilities until He Who Shall Not Be Named moved it into the schools. This takes up one classroom at Ben Franklin and One at Churchill. The associated Staff also takes up space. The Early Childhood program (Does anyone know where it was housed?) Takes up 5 classrooms in the elementary schools and 1,2,or 3 at Hadley (Can't tell because it is lumped in with English as a New Language). So that is a total of 7 to 10 classrooms.

On the low end, that is 7 X 22 students = 154 to 10 x 25 = 250 students and faculty that were in the school system but using other space. That is how we went from 270 students to 588 students in portables from 2004 to present.

I am not making a judgement call about whether these students should be in the physical schools with the rest of the students or if they should be back at the Park District or in rented space elsewhere. I am only accounting for a major reason that the portables increased from 12 to 26.

I remember the fight about Special Ed being moved out of Churchill and Lincoln to another location during the administration prior to Dr. No Name about 5 years ago. I know a number of families with kids in the program and there was a lot of community pressure to keep the kids in the school. It seams to me in some ways that whether we should or should not have everyone under one roof is the $40 million question. I don't think that state law demands it either way.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by ali1000:
On the low end, that is 7 X 22 students = 154 to 10 x 25 = 250 students and faculty that were in the school system but using other space. That is how we went from 270 students to 588 students in portables from 2004 to present.[QUOTE]

At the Hadley evening forum the question was asked: What caused the increase in use of portables in the 2 years from 04-06 when the enrollment numbers essentially remained unchanged. The answer from the District, Not Dr Riebock (Who fielded the rest of the questions except this one), was the creation of additional sections in grades when the class sizes were artificialy reduced to conform with the 2001 referendum.

#1 - The portables usage was created by the administration and #2 - the class sizes went below the average numbers that the district promised in 2001.

Brought back to more reasonable numbers, would we still need some portables? Yes. Would we need 26? We don't even utilize 26 now. The 3/25 enrollment report shows at least 3 portables at Churchill that are only used by specialists on an infrequent basis during the day. The total enrollment in portables is 534, not 600. Symantics, maybe, but the cause and affect of the portables was artificially induced to create panic and fear in the community to support a referendum....Period.

quote:

Originally posted by Rob Herbold:
The 3/25 enrollment report shows at least 3 portables at Churchill that are only used by specialists on an infrequent basis during the day. The total enrollment in portables is 534, not 600. Symantics, maybe, but the cause and affect of the portables was artificially induced to create panic and fear in the community to support a referendum....Period.

That's a good point, Rob, about the Churchill portables. The District went almost the entire year with two fifth grade sections incorrectly shown as being in portables on the monthly enrollment reports. It was Steve Vondrak, board candidate, who caught that error after he and I toured Churchill with Principal Klespitz and brought it to the District's attention. Unfortunately, the "600 kids in portables" mantra (now, sadly, repeated in the press - even in the Daily Herald's Vote NO editorial) was already engrained in the literature. Actually, if you go to D41 and click on their enrollment reports , all the filenames now include REVISED March 07, and have been edited to reflect the change.

The shading that denotes a portable section is hard to see on these scans to begin with, but you can still access the old reports for comparision by deleting the REVISED March 07 from the filename and refreshing your browser.

The District has, however, not purged the "nearly 600" language from their website yet ( see this link), and I don't suppose that they or Growing41 will fall over themselves trying to issue corrections in their literature. This is no small point. 534 is not "nearly 600".