“Plan Ahead” might well have been the motto for St. Charles School District 303 when preparing for the unveiling of the new St. Charles North High School this fall.
Not only was the building itself constructed four years ago in anticipation of the town’s current surge in high school students, but the name itself was carefully chosen to save the name “West” for yet another new high school years down the road.
The need for a new high school has long been evident in the fast-growing river town, whose K-12 school enrollment currently stands at 10,500, according to Kim Perkins, assistant superintendent for human resources of District 303. “We’ve grown steadily since the 1970s,” he said. “As little as three years ago, we had 800 fewer students.”
St. Charles High School, which will be renamed St. Charles East High School in the fall, has managed to handle an ever-increasing student enrollment, but it can’t go on absorbing the population growth forever, Perkins added.
This fall, St. Charles North will open to a population of 800 to 900 freshman and sophomore students, allowing St. Charles junior and senior students a chance to finish at the school where they began their high school studies, Perkins added.
The building that will house St. Charles North, situated on about 75 acres at 255 Red Gate Rd., has served for the past several years as the home of Wredling Middle School, said Frank Kesman, principal of St. Charles North. But the building was designed with the intention that it would eventually be transformed into a high school. “The lockers were a little bigger, the halls a little wider, the electronics a bit more sophisticated,” Kesman said.
When high school students begin filing through the doors in the fall, Wredling Middle School will open in a building on the campus of St. Charles East High School.
“When Wredling was built as a middle school four years ago, they built a clone of that building on the grounds of the existing high school,” Kesman said. “Because many of the (high school) students who needed to be accommodated in that additional building on the old campus will be going to North High School, the building will be free to become the new Wredling Middle School.”
The new Wredling will solve another problem, Kesman added. For the past four years, all three middle schools in St. Charles have been on the west side of the Fox River, which bisects the town. This imbalance will be partially rectified when Wredling opens on the east side. With this coming school year, there will be a high school on each side of the river, and at least one middle school on each side as well.
Balance will slowly be struck in the high school enrollment as well.
The enrollment of St. Charles East will drop from the 3,100 to 3,200 range in 1999-2000 to about 2,400 to 2,500 students in the fall. Over the next three years, the population will decrease further as a junior class and eventually a senior class enters St. Charles North. Eventually, both schools will house about 1,900 students, Kesman said.
The new high school will also make it easier for high school students in St. Charles to remain active participants in extracurricular activities, Kesman added. “The community said if we have two smaller schools, we’ll have more opportunities for students to get involved,” he said.
While splitting its high school population across two schools, the school board in St. Charles has made a commitment through its strategic plan to integrate more fully technology into the instructional program.
“I’m working with a committee of faculty members to achieve that integration,” Kesman said. “For example, (at St. Charles North) we’ll have an updated (computer-aided design) lab and a digital art lab. There will be a computer in every classroom eventually, and there’ll be Internet access in every office and classroom.”
Plans also call for two 28-station computer labs designed for both general student use and instruction in such skills as keyboarding, word processing and software application. The computer labs will be immediately adjacent to the school’s Learning Resource Center.
Even the name St. Charles North High School is a testament to the long-range thinking of the district, Kesman said. The new school was originally slated to be called St. Charles West High School, and the original plans still bear that name. But a large area of undeveloped land remains on the western edge of the community, and the district decided to withhold the name in anticipation that another high school will be built there someday.
Meantime, there are no immediate plans for design changes to St. Charles East High School at 1020 Dunham Rd., said Nina Narozny, its principal since 1996. The school will still be overcrowded next year and will feature four mobile classroom units on campus, she said.
St. Charles East High School was built in the late 1970s to replace the old high school, which became Thompson Middle School. It was originally designed to handle 2,200 students, Narozny said.
“But over the years, we’ve renovated spaces to become more flexible, reducing traditional classrooms and adding labs and multipurpose rooms to offer additional programming.”
The result has been even less space for the increasing throngs of new students. As a result, St. Charles High School operated on a split-shift schedule for several years prior to the construction of the north annex building on its campus in 1996.
Now that the enrollment of St. Charles East High School will be dropping over the next three years, discussions are to begin regarding possible design changes.
What with the opening of a high school and the chance to reconfigure the existing one, it’s an exciting time in education in St. Charles, both Narozny and Kesman reported.
“We see this as a renaissance,” Narozny said. “St. Charles High School has always been in the forefront of innovation, and we’ll continue to raise the bar. We’re all very excited. It’s a great time in education.”
Kesman added that, with the new high school’s unveiling imminent, there’s a palpable sense of eagerness in the community.
“Not only for myself, but also for the student population . . . the excitement is building,” he said.
