With a second middle school opening in September, Barrington-based School District 220 is looking for ways to distribute pupils between the two schools and offer all the same opportunities.
The School Board will decide Monday how to shuffle 1,608 pupils from eight elementary schools into two middle schools.
The district covers 72 square miles, drawing pupils from Barrington, South Barrington, Barrington Hills, Hoffman Estates, Carpentersville and five smaller communities. Some parts of the district are quite wealthy; others are middle-class.
The substantial differences in the elementary schools` pupil populations are what makes the middle school decision difficult, said Supt. Frederick Vorlop.
The district wants to distribute the pupils so that each middle school has a mix and can serve both children bound for college and children bound for work after high school graduation. ”We`re trying to create programs that are both comparable and excellent,” Vorlop said.
In some elementary schools nearly all the pupils eventually go on to college, while at one primary school relatively few ultimately go beyond high school, Vorlop said.
Standardized test scores also show a substantial difference, he said. The results of last year`s Iowa Basics Skills Tests show that 20 percent of the pupils at Sunny Hill School in Carpentersville scored in the top quarter, compared with 62 percent at Countryside School in Barrington Hills.
The more academically inclined children, Vorlop said, are interested in foreign languages, orchestra and classes for the gifted. He wants both middle schools to have enough pupils to support such courses.
”The best way we can ensure the programs are similar is to have relatively the same social and economic backgrounds in each school,” said Vorlop.
Out of 12 redistricting plans presented to the board and parents last week, two options were most popular: either to send half the children from each elementary school to each middle school, or to divide the district so that half the elementary schools send all their children to one middle school and half send to the other.
The administration and three of the seven board members said they favored splitting each school. If that plan is approved, 841 pupils would be bused to the Station Campus Middle School on Eastern Avenue and 767 to the newly built Prairie Campus on Dundee Road.
Splitting each school population would help pupils who haven`t fared well because they could start over with new peers in a new school, Vorlop said.
But four of the board members said they preferred to split the district along Lake-Cook Road, with 831 pupils attending Station Campus to the north and 777 at Prairie Campus to the south.
