The Indian Prairie District 204 school board was given an overview of several big ticket items facing the district in coming years, including the costs to reduce class sizes, the final phase of air-conditioning work at the elementary schools and other much-needed school maintenance improvements.
Those expenditures come at a time when District 204’s state funding is projected to fall over the next five years.
Board President Lori Price said she, like the board members, support many of the ideas before the board: lowering class sizes, fixing the roofs or adding lacrosse at the high school.
“What’s the priority here? We still have to fix the roofs. We’re going to have tough decisions to make,” said Price, who suggested a survey of the District 204 community might help guide the board.
Chief Business Official Jay Strang started by reiterating the district’s position that the cost of hiring additional personnel to reduce sizes in all core and encore classes by one student would be $4.8 million.
He also said if the district were to cap class sizes at 15 at the elementary level and 25 for middle and high schools, the personnel cost would be about $15.7 million.
The option of limiting class sizes across all levels at 25 would be $4.7 million, and for $2.3 million, Indian Prairie could cap class size at 25 for elementary, 27 for middle school and 28 for high school.
Laura Devine Johnston, assistant superintendent for elementary schools, said some of the options, like capping elementary class sizes at 15, are just not physically possible at the schools because there aren’t enough classrooms available.
She also warned the numbers are very general and do not take into account the sizes of individual schools.
As an example, two elementary schools on the northern edge of the district — Brookdale in Naperville and Brooks in Aurora — continue to operate above a 90 percent capacity. At the elementary level, schools are designed so that at 90 percent of capacity, the art and music rooms would be converted into core classroom.
In the meantime at the far south end of the district, Graham and Kendall elementary schools in Naperville and Builta Elementary in Bolingbrook are at 44 percent of capacity.
Devine Johnston said unless the district added onto the buildings or shifted students to other schools, lowering class sizes at the northern schools would be impossible because of space constraints.
Board member Justin Karubas said the district doesn’t have a capacity problem at northern schools but rather an allocation issue. He suggested the district look harder at school boundaries to balance out numbers of students.
Class sizes are just one of the expenses issues facing District 204.
Director of Building Operations Todd DePaul estimated it will cost $9 million to complete the final phase of the elementary school air-conditioning project.
The cost would rise if the district were to divide the work over several years, he said.
DePaul also said the roofs on nine schools are well past their life expectancy, and the estimated cost to replace them is $4.8 million.
Because they are holding up at the moment, replacement has been deferred. But time is not on the district’s side as half of the nine roofs are 25 years or older.
DePaul said the district determines which roofs to repair first by which leak the most.
Once again, Strang gave a bleak outlook on finances.
The chief business official said despite pockets of student growth related to the construction of new homes, overall enrollment in the district is projected to decline.
That, coupled with rising property values, means state funding could be cut in half over the next few years, he said.
Where the district will come up with the revenue to make up for the loss is under review by administrators, Strang said.
The district cut $40 million a few years ago, he said, and “we have no low-hanging fruit anymore.”
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