Here’s what’s going on at District 205
By Chris Fox
For The Elmhurst Independent
The Elmhurst Community Unit School District 205 Board held a regular meeting on April 14. All seven board members participated in the meeting, which took place remotely, with board members and staff members communicating online. The meeting lasted nearly four hours.
Public comments could have been submitted to the meeting in writing. No comments were submitted.
Caforio thanks community
Kara Caforio, the president of the District 205 Board, read a statement at the beginning of the meeting to thank members of the community for their contributions while schools have been closed to on-site instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. (See sidebar story with her statement in full.)
Plans for Lincoln, Field discussed
The meeting featured presentations with information about schematic designs of plans for the new Lincoln Elementary School and the new Field Elementary School. Both schools will be rebuilt with funding from the referendum of November of 2018. Voters approved that referendum, authorizing the district to borrow up to $168.5 million to improve the district’s facilities.
Craig Siepka and Leanne Meyer-Smith, both of Wight & Company—District 205’s architecture firm—delivered the online presentation during the remote meeting. Siepka, the lead designer of the projects to rebuild the two schools, noted that the plans for both schools are in the early conceptual stage. Siepka related that his firm is pursuing the placement of storm water detention underneath the parking lots of both new schools.
District 205 Superintendent David Moyer stated that the new Lincoln Elementary School will be built for 600 to 650 students, while the new Field Elementary School will be built for 400 to 450 students. He said both new buildings will have two more classrooms than buildings they will replace. Those additional classrooms, Moyer said, will accommodate future growth in enrollment.
The new Lincoln building is expected to be ready for the 2022-23 school year. The new Field building could potentially be open for the 2023-24 school year.
Siepka and Meyer-Smith said they will continue to refine the design plans for the two new schools. They will provide their next presentation to the board at the board’s meeting on May 26.
Moyer said that there are plans for community involvement in the designs of the new schools. He also said that construction is moving forward as originally planned. He said that in light of the pandemic, there could be some future challenges, such as a potential limit on how many construction workers are allowed in a particular space.
Student handbook presentation given
The April 14 meeting also included a presentation about the student handbooks for York High School and the district’s middle schools for the 2020-21 school year. Scott Grens, the district’s assistant superintendent of innovation and growth, led the presentation. According to information provided by the district, York’s 2020-21 handbook will include general guidelines for average amounts of homework by grade. The guidelines state that freshmen should have no more than 90 minutes of total homework per day, while sophomores should have have no more than 100 minutes of homework per day. According to the guidelines, the time spent on homework rises to no more than 110 minutes per day for juniors and no more than 120 minutes per day for seniors. The estimates are intended for four or five days per week and encompass the total amount of homework for all classes. The guidelines note that individual students work at different rates.
Technology report includes budget of $3.15 million
The April 14 meeting also included a technology report, with presentations featuring David Smith, the district’s outgoing executive director of technology, and R.J. Bialk, the district’s new executive director of technology. The presentations noted that the district has a preliminary technology budget of about $3.15 million for its 2021 fiscal year. That figure includes about $1.3 million in the category of equipment leases of items including computers, servers and copiers.
The technology presentation noted that York High School’s Internet bandwidth will receive an upgrade in the 2020-21 school year. York’s Internet bandwidth will be five times greater in the next school year. There will also be bandwidth upgrades at the administration center, and in the overall district network. If the upgrades aren’t completed this summer, they will be finished during the 2020-21 school year.
Moyer recommends professional learning days
Near the end of the meeting, Moyer said he was recommending five professional learning days for the district’s teachers during the remainder of the current school year. He said those days, which would be implemented on Fridays, would give teachers time to collaborate more effectively with their grade-level peers. Moyer also said that the professional learning days would allow teachers to improve their ability to utilize technology while instruction is being delivered online. The first of the five proposed professional learning days took place on Friday, April 17.
School closed for remainder of school year
The district’s schools have been closed to on-site instruction since the end of regular classes on March 13. On April 17, three days after the April 14 board meeting, Gov. JB Pritzker announced that all K-12 schools in Illinois would be closed to on-site instruction for the rest of the 2019-20 school year. Pritzker had previously ordered the state’s schools to be closed through at least April 30.
Moyer said that online instruction is a new environment, and that teachers can’t replicate in-classroom instruction in a remote setting. He said teachers need more time to collaborate to make sure all students’ needs are met while remote learning is in place. Moyer added that teachers can give students activities to work on during the professional learning days.
Moyer described the first week of online instruction—the week of March 16—as “canned learning.” He said that instruction—E-Learning—was essentially intended to provide for five emergency days, such as snow days. Moyer said that in the subsequent school days of the current school year, the district has transitioned to Remote Learning—what he described as an entirely different process than E-Learning.
“I think teachers are processing; most of them have really committed to wanting to get better at this,” said Moyer in discussing online instruction while school buildings are closed. “But they’re experiencing a lot of the same frustrations that families are, trying to figure all this stuff out.”
Moyer said the only differences students would notice on the professional learning days are that teachers wouldn’t be available in their normal 90-minute windows, and that students would not have to sign in for attendance purposes.
What about grades during online learning?
Board member Jim Collins asked how students’ grades would be handled during online learning. Moyer said that as of March 13—the final day of on-site instruction—no students’ grades could go down. Moyer said that those grades, by law, could not be reduced during the period of online instruction. He said part of that was due to inequities, including students’ home lives and different access to technology.
Moyer said that while students’ grades since March 13 cannot go down during the remainder of the school year, it is possible that students could complete work during the time of online instruction to improve their grade in a particular class.
Board member Courtenae Trautmann said she was concerned that the five professional learning days would reduce the amount of structured learning during the rest of the school year. Moyer said the district is trying to mitigate that to the greatest extent possible. Moyer added that no matter what steps the district takes, students’ learning will suffer while school buildings are closed.
“There’s going to be learning loss over the summer, and on into next year,” he said. “We’re not going to be able to prevent learning loss.”
Moyer stated that the implementation of the five professional learning days would have a greater upside than a downside. He said that at the next board meeting on April 28, district administrators will give the board options for the remainder of the school year. Moyer said the district has been holding off on discussing those options because there are too many hypothetical situations, and it would frustrate people more than it would help them to not have certain information about topics including athletic schedules and York High School’s graduation. The original schedule called for York’s Class of 2020 to hold its commencement on Sunday, May 17.
