Category Archives: Peoria Public Schools

City of Peoria, Peoria Public Schools

It’s time for Peoria schools to be reborn

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The Journal Star reports this morning that Dunlap schools (District 323) have added 167 new students this year. More students means more federal dollars; it also means more people are moving into the Dunlap School District, bringing more property tax revenue into the system. Dunlap School Superintendant Jeanne Williamson is quoted as saying, “I welcome our growth, it says to us the school district is attracting families to Dunlap … and we’ll continue to serve them.”

But when she says they’re attracting families “to Dunlap,” she doesn’t mean more people are moving into the village, just the school district. Williamson was interviewed in a recent issue of Peoria Woman and had these interesting statistics to share (emphasis mine):

For the past two school years, we’ve tracked where our new Dunlap students come from. Only about 15 percent of our growth is a shift from District 150. The majority of our new students are from families moving into the Peoria area from other locations. There’s been extensive new construction and development of subdivisions in the City of Peoria that are located in the Dunlap School District; this enhances the decision for families to buy these homes. Since approximately 70 percent of our students live in the City of Peoria, it’s been a great marriage between the city and the Dunlap School District.

I would argue that it hasn’t been a “great marriage” for the city. It’s more like a divorce because it divides the city and damages our sense of community (and by “community,” I mean, “a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals”). We now have a situation where the northern part of the city has an economically-advantaged student base with a growing school district budget, and the southern part of the city has an economically-disadvantaged student base with a growing school district deficit. District 150 is trying to educate the neediest, most at-risk children with dwindling resources while all the tax revenue from Peoria’s growth area is going to the least needy.

It’s the age-old story of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. And something needs to be done about it.

As readers of my site know, I’m a proponent of the Heart of Peoria Plan and related initiatives to revitalize our older neighborhoods in the core of the city. But everyone acknowledges that the biggest things we need to be working on in Peoria are crime and schools. We’ll leave crime for a later discussion; right now, let’s talk about what can be done to improve the schools.

I propose (and this is not original with me) that we consolidate school districts 150 and 323. Since 70 percent of the students in District 323 are from Peoria anyway, I don’t see any reason to have separate school districts that divide our city and cause an ever-increasing economic disparity that hurts the neediest of our city’s children. Our civic leaders should begin a campaign now to lobby for consolidation. I realize it will be an uphill battle and may take years to succeed, but someone needs to get the ball rolling.

I think it should start with the District 150 school board working directly with the District 323 school board. If those two boards vote to consolidate, a referendum can be put on the ballot. Otherwise, it would take petitions with 50 signatures from District 150 residents and 50 signatures from District 323 residents to get a referendum on the ballot. However, if the school boards were for it, I think that would carry more weight with the public.

Under a new law for school consolidation, the way it could work is that both District 150 and 323 would be dissolved and a new district formed with a new school board elected at the same time. Thus, it wouldn’t be like one district joining the other, but a new district with new leadership formed all at once. This could be the renaissance that Peoria needs to improve education for all the children of our city.

The last time Peoria experienced massive growth — back in the ’60s when Richwoods township was annexed — civic leaders (and the media, including the Journal Star) campaigned tirelessly and passionately about the importance of having a united school district, and they succeeded. I’m confident that it can be done again.

City Council, City of Peoria, Peoria Public Schools

City takes the high road

Despite having the school board spit in their eye over the replacement school for the Woodruff attendance area, the city asked for input from the school board regarding their plans to implement two new TIF districts along the Warehouse District and Southern Gateway.  It’s good to see the city taking the high road and showing some statesmanship in this matter.

At the same time, I was happy to see the city council not just throwing good money after bad in the name of cooperation.  At last week’s council meeting, there was a proposal on the agenda to replace sidewalks around one of the schools slated to close within the next year or so — clearly a huge waste of money.  They wisely deferred that item until they could get more information from the school board on their plans for that school.

Kudos to the Council for playing fair, but not playing the fool with District 150.

Peoria Public Schools

School District 150 proves it’s easy to rehab older schools

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Peoria Public Schools logoWell, well, what have we here? WEEK.com has this chipper report about the supposedly old, horrible, dilapidated, beyond-repair, poorly-lit, un-air-conditioned dungeon known as Blaine-Sumner Middle School.

This is one of those schools that just couldn’t be rehabilitated and had to close. It’s one of those schools that District 150 said would cost more to renovate than to shut down. It’s one of those schools that costs so much in operations and maintenance, that the only way the school could save money was to mothball it along with ten other buildings and build five new ones. This is one of those schools that has all that plaguing asbestos that would surely be loosed and kill everyone inside if air conditioning were to be introduced.

And yet…

This is the school that, according to WEEK, “crews spent a month cleaning and painting…for its new use.” This is the school about which “Special Education Assistant Director Bryan Pullen said, ‘Air was added to all the offices, all the rooms, so there was some actual costs, but I think in the long run it will probably save money.'” This is the school that is “[t]he newly named Blaine Sumner Complex [which] is now home to special Education Services.”

So Blaine-Sumner, which was one of the lowest scoring buildings on the district’s Master Facilities Plan, was rehabbed with a little paint and some A/C in about a month. And now it’s going to be home to “[e]ighty-five special education workers including psychologists, coordinators and Medicaid staff….”

Huh. Let’s review the district’s Master Facilities Plan again. Blaine-Sumner was one of six buildings (net) that was supposed to save (among other things) about $500,000 annually in operation and maintenance costs. I quote:

Presuming a net number of school closures at six and based on Operations and Maintenance savings of $500,000 per school closed, a savings of $3 million could be realized.

So, the question is, how do they make up the approximately $500,000 they were supposed to save by closing this building? How does this impact the master plan? Will they have to close another school now?

And, of course, the big question: If it’s this easy to rehabilitate these old buildings — and remember, according to the master plan, Blaine-Sumner was one of the worst-scoring on health/life/safety and operational tests — why do they need to close 11 of them and build 5 new ones in the first place? It looks to me like they’re not all that hard to fix up after all.

City of Peoria, Peoria Public Schools

Time to consolidate school districts?

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On the agenda Tuesday night is a request from Wilder-Waite Elementary School to be annexed into the City of Peoria.  Wilder-Waite is part of Dunlap School District 323.  They can’t be annexed yet because their boundary is not contiguous with Peoria, but they want to sign an annexation agreement so that when Peoria does annex the land between the current city limits and their property, they will also be annexed in and receive police, fire, and other Peoria services.

When Richwoods Township was annexed into Peoria, there were several school districts that shortly afterwards were consolidated with District 150; a unified school district was an important part of the annexation plans.  There was the fear that without such consolidation, Peoria schools would be divided into the haves and have-nots.

Considering the tax revenue that is generated in the northern part of Peoria that doesn’t go to District 150 but to District 323, are we not seeing that happen today? Aren’t we concentrating the wealth of the city into one school district while the other district suffers?  Isn’t it time we unified the school districts within Peoria’s city limits?

Peoria Public Schools

District 150 slowly coming back to reality

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Despite some ridiculous quotes in this story about last night’s school board meeting, I actually found it somewhat encouraging. The school district is at least acknowledging that there is a limit to the amount of money it can realistically spend, even if it is for the worthy goal of children’s education.

New board president David Gorentz is quoted as saying, “My concern is that we might spend more money in a few schools and really have that be the ideal design, but is that really the best for 15,000 students in District 150?” Good question. I would say, no.

If these buildings are really as inadequate as we’ve been told by the school board, and are really hampering the children’s education, then it would be irresponsible to put all the construction money into one or two schools while the other four or so are left in a state of disrepair. I think the school board is slowly coming to the realization that they can dream up what they believe is the perfect learning environment, but in the end, it takes money — money they don’t have — to accomplish it. Compromise will have to be made.

But compromise is always talked about in the gravest of terms. To wit (emphasis mine):

Education consultant Judy Helm said the schools could be reduced to a square footage similar to original estimates but at a significant cost to kids’ education.

That sounds ominous. We don’t want to jeopardize the kids’ education…. But, what specifically would have to be cut?

The district would have to forgo the concept of a community library and a health clinic, eliminate teacher planning areas, eliminate “integrated learning areas” for kids, reduce the size of classrooms, reduce the lunch room size and eliminate all classrooms for community/parent education, Helm said. These cuts would reduce the square footage to about 93,000.

Read over that list again. Do these items really represent a “significant cost to kids’ education”? Since when is a community health clinic or the size of the lunch room vital to a child’s education, for instance? Some of those things are easy to eliminate. (I’m not sure what “teacher planning areas” are in a grade school where teachers have their own rooms; do they need a separate “planning area”? I’m open to correction on that one.)

The biggest problem is the transformation of these facilities from replacement elementary schools to “community schools.” Most of the items Helm lists are a direct result of this shift. Since “community schools” are not part of the documented Master Facilities Plan, the district should either follow the plan or revise it — if they choose the latter, they should re-crunch the numbers to see if they can afford such an aggressive plan. I bet they can’t, and it looks like the school board is coming to that same conclusion, albeit slowly.

Peoria Public Schools

District 150 plans get more expensive every day

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There are two stories in the Journal Star today about District 150 that are curious.

The first one says that the Glen Oak School site isn’t big enough to accommodate all the programs that a building committee recommended. Of course, those recommendations were based on a 15-acre site: according to the district’s Q & A piece, question 13, the “public input, community partner input, educator expertise input, and design expertise input” all based their analysis of programming needs “on a generic, 15-acre site as presented during Workshop 4.” So it should come as no suprise that programs designed to fill 15 acres won’t fit into a smaller area. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy!

Thus, the rhetoric regarding the Glen Oak School site is that certain things will need to be “cut” or “sacrificed.” But this is misleading. It’s like a kid having a Ford Focus and telling his dad he wants a GT, then when his father offers to help him buy a Mustang instead, he complains about all the “sacrifices” he’d have to make to drop from a GT to a Mustang. Give me a break. The site the city offered is three times the size of the current Glen Oak School and provides more than enough space at a more reasonable cost.

And speaking of cost, that brings us to the second story in the paper today. It turns out that expanding the scope of a project costs more money — something business people know, but apparently caught the school district by surprise.

The board’s original plan (as stated in the Master Facilities Plan) was to replace Glen Oak and White with a K-8 school; that is, it would just be a school building for kids in kindergarten through eighth grade. Somewhere between that plan and their negotiations with the Park District, the new school became a “B-8,” or “birth through eighth-grade community school,” “which means they will provide services for parents, their young children and the community.”

That means the size of the school has increased from 80,000 square feet to 120,000 square feet, which means the cost of such a school building has increased from $15 million to $21 million. The Journal Star then says, ” Where the additional money will come from is unclear.” Ah, yes, the understatement of 2006.

Comically, this all started out as the district’s attempt to save money. Remember? They were going to close these old, inefficient schools and build new, energy-efficient ones which would pay for themselves in the maintenance savings. I wonder how the change in scope from K-8 elementary school to B-8 community school affects their break-even point; that is, I wonder how many years (decades?) it will be before the supposed maintenance and efficiency cost savings exceed the cost of land acquisition and construction. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that will happen on the fifth of never.

So now we have a school district that is horribly in debt that, in an attempt to save money, has figured out a way to put itself in more debt without any visible means of funding their scheme — other than asking the taxpayers to pony up more money, which is not likely to pass.

Moving to the east side of the river looks more appealing all the time.

City of Peoria, East Bluff, Peoria Park District, Peoria Public Schools

Questions and Questionable Answers

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Peoria Public Schools logoThe Journal Star provides on their website a copy of the “Questions and Answer” sheet Ken Hinton distributed at the special District 150 School Board meeting on Monday. On pages three and four, it says this:

9. What is the actual size of the property being acquired at the park site. DW

ANSWER: A total of 10.47 acres is being acquired at the Park site either by actual purchase by the School District or subject to the 99-year Intergovernmental Agreement. In addition, however, Glen Oak Park is 110 acres and all of the facilities will be available for school use subject to mutually agreed rules and regulations (scheduling, etc.) The general Park site includes such things as Centennial Playground, the theatre bandshell, baseball/softball diamonds, Children’s Museum, Zoo, soccer fields, nature areas, numerous tennis courts (some of which are currently being used by Woodruff High School) and Botanical Gardens and Conservatory.

At the Park District Board meeting tonight, East Bluff United Neighborhood Association president Marty Palmer asked the board members about that answer during the public comments period. I wasn’t personally there to hear it, but he reports to me in an e-mail that “the board denied all of the answers” to that question, and “they (board) have not talked to #150 at all since the letter of intent was signed.”

So it does appear that District 150 is (once again) jumping the gun on their site plans. Until they have an actual intergovernmental agreement (not just a letter of intent), they can’t assume all of the things they’re proposing in their question and answer document.

But there’s something else that’s questionable about their answer to this question and question 18 (“Would the city be willing to cover the cost of going to the park if the current school site is chosen”). Please bear with me as I set this up:

One of the big selling factors for the park site is that the kids will be able to utilize the park because they’ll be immediately adjacent to it. Specifically, the document mentions such things as the baseball diamonds, zoo, children’s museum, tennis courts, and botanical gardens. Has anyone looked at how far away from the park site these features are?

The land the school wants to build on is on the corner of Frye and Prospect. Even assuming the school building would sit on the farthest northeast corner of the proposed site (which would be unlikely), the approximate distances from the building to these wonderful amenities are:

Feature Distance
Baseball Diamonds 380-700 feet
Zoo 750 feet
Children’s Museum 900 feet
Tennis Courts 1000 feet
Botanical Gardens 1300 feet

For comparison, a city block in that area is about 350 feet. So, the closest baseball diamond is about a block away, and the botanical gardens are almost four blocks away — almost as far as it is from the current Glen Oak School to the park. Are we to assume that these children are going to walk from the new school building to these features?

I’ll buy the baseball diamonds. But do you really see 30-60 six-year-olds trapsing across the park to the zoo when it’s 94 degrees outside or raining? Or walking two and a half blocks to the children’s museum in the snow in 25 degree weather? Or ever walking to the botanical gardens even if it were 72 and sunny?

My point is that it’s very likely these kids are going to be loaded up on buses and driven to many of these different parts of the park anyway (which makes their question 18 moot). And if that’s the case, why can’t they do that from the current Glen Oak School site now? Obviously the cost of transportation to the park would be far less, even given the price of gas these days, than the cost of either building on the park site or creating a 10-acre campus at Wisconsin and Frye.

City of Peoria, Peoria Public Schools

It’s all over but the budget busting

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I wasn’t at the school board meeting last night, but I didn’t need to be. It was as predictable as the sun rising in the east. I’m not quite sure why they’re continuing the charade of “evaluating” the two proposed school sites; they’re not fooling anyone.

The school board decided on this site long ago, and nothing is going to stop them now. If they want to make unilateral decisions and ignore the city, parents, and residents — not to mention budget realities — that’s their prerogative, but a very foolish course of action. The school board fancies itself as the Lone Ranger, a vigilante board that can save Peoria singlehandedly. But they’re really more like Don Quixote: idealistic and impractical, mistaking friends for enemies, well-meaning but delusional.

They’ll build their school on the park site, and they’ll congratulate each other in the shadow of their burned bridges.

Peoria Public Schools

School board meeting tonight at 5:30

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Peoria Public School District 150 will be meeting tonight at 5:30 to discuss the new school for the Woodruff High School attendance area. You can join them at 3202 N. Wisconsin Ave. and let your voice be heard, or you can watch them on cable channel 17.

I’ll be on a date with my wife tonight, so I’m afraid I won’t be able to attend. The options were The Fish House and a movie, or the school board meeting. Can you believe she chose the former?

Of course, I’ll tape the meeting for later.

UPDATE: I was mistaken about the TV coverage — they only broadcast “regular” school board meetings, and this one is a “special” meeting. So, you’ll have to go in person if you want to see it. I guess I’ll have to read about it in the paper tomorrow….

Heart of Peoria Plan, Peoria Public Schools

District 150 tries to co-opt Heart of Peoria Plan

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One thing I didn’t mention in my previous post about last night’s school board meeting was the sudden use of New Urbanist rhetoric when talking about the Glen Oak Park site for a new school. One school board member suggested narrowing Prospect and putting diagonal parking in front of the new school to improve safety and reduce the need for such a large parking lot, which is not a bad idea in a “when-life-gives-you-lemons-make-lemonade” sort of way. Another board member went so far as to say that Andres Duany himself recommends putting schools on the periphery of a neighborhood. Duany is the author of the Heart of Peoria Plan, which (if the board would read the plan) actually advocates renovating the current school buildings.

In one sense, it’s encouraging that the Heart of Peoria Plan is on the district’s radar now. But on the other hand, they seem to be trying to co-opt it for their own purposes. Instead of a plain reading, they’re trying to manipulate the plan to fit their preconceived idea of where the school should be sited. When the plan clearly contradicts their ideas, they look to the larger body of New Urbanist writings to look for justification for their plan.