Jan. 22--A long-awaited plan to adjust the middle and high school boundaries across School District U46's sprawling footprint has been placed on hold for at least a year, district officials confirmed Thursday.
The U46 School Board approved a plan to change elementary school boundaries last month that will relocate 605 students to new schools in the next school year.
Reformulating district boundaries has been on the district's radar since 2014, and is the first such realignment since 2004.
"We are putting discussion of our planned secondary school boundary changes on hold for at least a year as we review expansion of some of our programs, particularly our Dual Language programs at several of our Middle Schools," district spokeswoman Mary Fergus said in an email.
The dual language programs are in the midst of being rolled out at district middle schools, Fergus said.
"Over the past few months, as staff discussed this expansion of the Dual Language program to our middle schools, we realized that it would be better to proceed with that program expansion and then later review enrollment at the secondary level," she said.
A report from the volunteer Citizens' Advisory Council that was presented to the school board with elementary school boundary recommendations last month called for Phase 2 of the assessment to be reported to the board by December 2016.
Phase 2 would have offered solutions for overcrowded middle and high schools, with initiatives that could then be put in place by the 2017-18 school year, according to the report.
Roger Wallace, a Citizens' Advisory Council official overseeing the boundary assessments, said last month that the organization had not started looking at middle and high schools before referring all further questions back to the district.
The changes voted into effect for U46 elementary schools last month also paves the way for district-wide, full-day Kindergarten.
District changes ended up falling most heavily on Lincoln Elementary families, with 246 of the 605 relocated students hailing from that school.
The Citizens' Advisory Council's initial elementary recommendations sought to move 107 kids from Nature Ridge Elementary in Bartlett over to Liberty Elementary, but those plans were abandoned after parents complained at a special Dec. 7 meeting.
The plans approved by the school board also grandfathered in fifth-graders, allowing those in the affected areas to stay at their old schools for the 2016-17 school year.
District U46 has the second-largest bilingual program in the state, according to the district, serving not only Spanish-speaking students but those who speak Polish and Tagalog as well.
The district's students are nearly 51 percent Hispanic, according to state data.
geoffz@tribpub.com
