The District 205 School Board heard Superintendent Ralph Grimm’s recommendations to “right-size” the district as well a building study that presented options to close schools.Grimm proposed nearly $2 million in expenditure cuts.
Some of key parts of those cuts include asking all staff to take a hard pay freeze at FY17 levels, Bright Futures Pre-k staff being drastically reduced, and 10 layoffs for elementary teachers.
Also architect Bill Phillips presented a building study with nine different options in the light of $26 million in mandated improvements for Health Life Safety need to be made to buildings in the next ten years.
The different options show different configurations of closing certain district schools, while adding on to others.
While changing and or adding to schools would be more expensive up front it would almost certainly save money for operational costs in the long run.
Phillips will seek direction from members on which two or three options they would like to flesh out for operational cost estimates.
The two that members seemed to favor the most was option 2 and 8, both which involve Churchill closing.
Several options involve all district students being at the same building as early as kindergarten.
Member Wayne Staham thinks this could go a long way towards bridging a cultural divide and allow more students to go to the new Silas Willard.
“It’s a great physical structure. It’s fantastic. And I don’t understand why every kid in town can’t go there,” Statham says.
The board will meet again Jan. 17 for a special meeting to approve going forward with the cuts and building study.
