The elementary school re-boundary process is officially underway in Jacksonville School District 117.
On Monday, the District 117 Board of Education had their first committee meeting for the district-wide re-boundary process.
The meeting began with a re-introduction of what the Board has charged the committee with completing, which includes having the process finished by the end of this year and implementing the changes by August of 2018.
The goal of this meeting was not to complete every part of the process in one night, but rather to get off to a good start, and Board President Noel Beard feels that the committee did just that.
Beard says that the board began with Murrayville because it seemed the easiest boundary to build around, and explains that the boundaries are being decided mostly based on number of classrooms.
“You can only put students from a certain area in the district into Murrayville, so we started with that as an example of where the Murrayville boundary could potentially be. We worked with that boundary until we got the number of students that we thought should be at Murrayville, and that number is determined by the number of classrooms. We will need ten classrooms per grade level across the district, and we have six schools. So that basically means we will have four elementary schools with two classrooms per grade level and two elementary schools with one classroom per grade level,” says Beard.
Beard says the Board drew a temporary line where they believe would give Murrayville the correct number of students for its designation.
“Based off of the number of classrooms that Murrayville has, we can’t put two classrooms for grade level there, so they by default become one of the schools that have one classroom per grade.We’re shooting for an average of twenty-four students per classroom, so that’s 144 students at Murrayville. We basically drew a temporary line – nothing is set in stone yet – a temporary line along I-72 and that gave us just about the number we were looking for,” says Beard.
The next regular board meeting is May 17th. The next Re-boundary committee meeting will be June 28th.