People like plowed streets, clean water, and their local schools. Year after year in Gallup polls, people think well of their local schools. So it should hardly be news that Wilmette families like their public schools. Yet recently, this was news.
On Feb. 5, several high ranking District 112 officials and board members took a field trip to Wilmette to examine how their fifth/sixth- and seventh/eighth-grade buildings worked. While technically not one campus, these two buildings are merely separated by some park district property and athletic fields. District 112 took this trip to help evaluate whether to proceed with its own two-building fifth- through eighth-grade campus. Wilmette was seen as a good comparison because of its similar size and demographics to Highland Park.
People should support District 112’s reconfiguration efforts, but that does not mean supporting this proposed campus. In selling this idea, 112 officials promote what is gained, like more specialized classes and more focused extracurriculars. They either don’t talk about or handwave away what is lost by going to such a large school.
Even accepting their sales pitch that the quality of opportunities would go up, research has shown that each time a child makes a school transition there is some learning loss. Right now we have three such transitions between kindergarten and twelfth grade. This proposed configuration would add a fourth.
According to the district’s own focus groups, the community rejected the idea of grade-based schools. A single middle school campus would mean that about half of the district would be grade-based.
There is also one rather crucial difference between Wilmette and District 112. Students from the large Wilmette Junior High go in ninth grade to the mammoth New Trier High School. Students from our proposed large seventh/eight school would go to the equally large Highland Park High School. Being with the same group of kids for six years would be stifling. While there is no doubt the parents and teachers they talked to in Wilmette are happy with their configuration, Wilmette also has roughly three times as many students in private schools as District 112.
All of this doesn’t even begin to address the traffic troubles a fifth- to eighth-grade campus on the proposed Red Oak/Sherwood site would cause. However, even if they found a different site to house the single middle school campus, it still wouldn’t be a good answer to our challenges.
Seven schools in District 112 is a good answer. We can know this because the multi-year work of community parents, leaders, and experts in education, finance, and architecture has told us so. However, seven schools can mean five elementary schools and two separate sixth- through eighth-grade middle schools. If people want their child to experience the benefits of a large middle school, I hear that they really like their schools over in Wilmette.
Lane Young is a columnist for Pioneer Press.
