District 65 Board May Adopt Class Size Policy

kindergarten teacher Eileen Chirhart remembers what it was like to have a substantially smaller number of students in her class.
Just last school year, Chirhart had just 16 students in her kindergarten class. This year, that number stands at 23.

“It took a long time getting used to having 23 students in my class,” said Chirhart. She said it is tougher to assess seven more students than last year and she sometimes finds herself wondering if she makes eye contact with each student every day.

Chirhart supports an initiative the Board may soon undertake: imposing a class size threshold that would force administrators, staff and board members to discuss solutions once the average class size reaches a set number.

“If we hit that trigger, it would make us call a meeting within a week, or however you want to do it,” said Superintendent John Asplund.

What that number will be has yet to be determined. At the board’s meeting Tuesday night,board members Mary Jane Brady and Corinne Torkelson agreed to champion the cause. They will devise a process and  report back to the full board at their April meeting.

“That’s a discussion I think we as a board need to have,” Torkelson said of having a class size policy. “I think that’s what the community wants to hear us talking about and then see us stick to that.”

Board Member Eric Grenier said in the nearly eight years he has sat on the District 65 Board, there has never been a policy in place regarding class sizes.
Some parents who spoke at the meeting Tuesday night, however, are concerned with where the kindergarten class sizes are headed. Lake Bluff resident Anne Stewart said the class sizes are too high at the younger grades.

In fact, she said the class sizes in Lake Forest District 67 are lower than those in District 65. She worries that this situation will result in District 65 students not being able to compete as well as District 67 students when they meet up at Lake Forest High School.

The average kindergarten class size in District 67 is 17, she said - a number that was confirmed by Andy Henrikson, who serves as assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction for both districts.

“Are our Lake Bluff students unfairly disadvantaged compared to Lake Forest?” said Stewart.

Henrikson said the reason District 67’s average kindergarten class size is lower is because the district offers full-day, half-day morning and half-day evening kindergarten sessions. Other class sizes, he said, average between 20 and 22. 

Comparatively, in Deerfield District 109, the class sizes have been even higher, said Henrikson, who worked for the district for 10 years. He said while he was the principal of South Park Elementary, a classroom received an assistant when the class size reached 25 students.

“Deerfield is a very high-performing district,” said Henrikson. “It wasn’t all about class size.”

The class sizes in District 65, however, remain a concern.

“We have got to understand that these little kids, these are the building-block times of their lives,” said Stewart. She mentioned a class-size study performed in Tennessee that ultimately revealed that students in smaller class sizes performed better in school.

The importance of having lower class sizes is not lost on District 65 staff and school board members. Asplund said a recommendation that will come before the school board in April will include changing a part-time kindergarten teacher position to a full-time position, therefore increasing the number of kindergarten teachers from 3.5 to four. He added that this will be done with the understanding that the district may need a fifth kindergarten teacher.

Lake Bluff Elementary School Principal Katie Williams said, so far, 53 full-time kindergarten students and 12 half-day students are already enrolled for the 2011-12 school year. She encouraged parents to continue registering their children early, a move that will help district officials better anticipate the class sizes.

Williams said the kindergarten enrollment information often fluctuates even up until the first day of school.

Asplund added that to further help school officials prepare, the assessment portion of the kindergarten school year will likely be held before the start of the school year. This will allow for easier placement of students.