From WMBD-TV:

The district is proposing the following: Closing Tyng primary school and consolidating Harrison, Garfield, Tyng and Trewyn into three pre-kindergarten through 8th grade buildings. The district also wants to close Woodruff High School and essentially merge it with Peoria High.

And from the Journal Star:

With the proposed closure of Tyng this year, students from Tyng, Garfield, Harrison and Trewyn will be consolidated, making the three open schools all pre-K through eighth-grade buildings.

Irving and Kingman also are on the list to close by the end of this school year; the Lincoln-Woodruff site would reopen as a pre-K through eighth-grade campus.

To curb the total number of students at a merged Woodruff-Peoria high school, officials proposed creating a “ninth-grade academy” to be housed at Loucks School for a year until Peoria High could be expanded. That’s provided the renovations at Thomas Jefferson school, closed this year because of a fire, are completed in time, because those students now are at Loucks. Eighth-graders at Hines and Von Steuben schools who would have attended Woodruff or Peoria High would attend Richwoods under the plan.

This plan actually makes sense. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not at all happy about school consolidation, larger class sizes, fewer teachers, or the loss of neighborhood schools. I still think that District 150 administration is top-heavy (and heavy on consultants, aka rehired retirees) and that cuts should start there. But assuming that the school district’s financial situation is as dire as they say it is, and assuming that consolidation is the only way to bridge the funding gap, this makes sense.

High school enrollment is not high enough to support four high schools in Peoria. Geographically, we have one high school to the north (Richwoods), one to the south (Manual), and two that are very close to each other in the middle (Central and Woodruff). It would make sense to close one of the high schools in the middle. Central is the older and more geographically centered of those two schools; it makes sense to keep it.

Reusing the Woodruff/Lincoln campus accomplishes two things: it lowers construction costs because a new primary school won’t need to be built on the campus, and it preserves the building for future use as a high school if enrollments go up again someday. I also like the return to K-8 schools instead of the primary/middle school setup.

However, Terry Knapp and Martha Ross are right. The board needs to solicit and seriously consider ideas from parents, teachers, principals, and staff members — not just make decisions in a vacuum. “It seems like just one or two people are making the decisions,” Martha Ross said, according to the Journal Star. Unfortunately, that’s standard operating procedure for District 150.