New students in a portion of Evanston’s Lincolnwood School attendance area could find themselves going to a different school, as a result of the failure of the new-school referendum last month.
The Lincolnwood School, located between Grant Street and Colfax Street in Northwest Evanston, is one of the schools most imminently in danger of overcrowding, as the projected number of students continues to grow in coming years. Current enrollment at 430 is expected to expand to 463 by the 2013-14 school year and to 468 in 2016.
Board member Richard Rykhus, at Monday night’s board meeting, suggested that one temporary solution might be to divert some of the incoming students to smaller classes at Kingsley, Walker, and King Lab. The students subject to the move would be those living in the portion of the district that is south and east of McCormick Boulevard that would have been assigned to the proposed new school in the 5th Ward.
He emphasized that, under his proposal, families that presently have students at Lincolnwood would be grandfathered in and would not be forced to move.
Veteran board member Jerome Summers warned that such a solution was discussed by the New School/Referendum Committee that he and Board President Katie Bailey chaired last year and that it generated 150 emails in protest.
“It gets real ugly very quickly,” he warned.
You can’t make everyone happy
The school board should seek some of the education they profess to give our children for they obviously have not yet learned the old adage that 'you can't make everyone happy.' Let's get on with planning for our children without the option of the "needed" new school that was soundly defeated by Evanstonians. Instead of making some decisions, this Board continues to sit around and waste time dreaming of what they would like and backing off of any real action. If their goal is to make every single person affected happy, we are never going to see a plan put in place.