Trish and Wes Smithing have sons who are just a year apart in school. When they moved to the Hollywood section of Brookfield last summer, they looked forward to their two boys walking to school together.
But that hasn’t happened yet and that it may never happen. Because of limits on enrollment, Clayton has to go to Central School in Riverside for kindergarten while his big brother, Jake, attends first grade at Hollywood School in Brookfield.
Tim and Victoria Young, who also moved to the Hollywood neighborhood last summer, face the face a similar problem. Even though they live just about a block or so from Hollywood School, their kindergartener Gillian was assigned to Central while her big brother, Conlan, attends fifth grade at Hollywood School.
The reason for their predicament is Riverside Elementary School District 96’s flexible boundary plan.
And they’re not happy about it.
“A kid in first grade and a kid in kindergarten, and they don’t know the same kids,” said Wes Smithing at the January meeting of the District 96 school board. “So they don’t get invited to the same birthday parties. It’s difficult. It’s just a really hard thing to deal with kids split apart.”
The policy is intended to limit class sizes in the district generally, including in the one section of kindergarten that Hollywood School, which had already reached the maximum enrollment of 23 by the time the Smithings and the Youngs had had a chance to register their children.
But District 96 Superintendent Jonathan Lamberson said the enrollment caps serve an important purpose.
“The policy, quite honesty, came out of educational research optimizing class size in the primary grades,” Lamberson said.
Small classes make for better education Lamberson said.
The flexible boundary plan was established in 2002, and until this year District 96 had a policy of limiting classes from kindergarten through third grade to no more than 20 students.
However, last summer the school board decided to raise the maximum number of kids in kindergarten and second grade classes to 23 to accommodate increased enrollment.
Hollywood School, the smallest in the district, is the only one to have just one section of each grade, including kindergarten.
Some Hollywood School parents want Hollywood to open another section of kindergarten, which it has space for. But Lamberson said that would require kindergartners from east of First Avenue to attend Hollywood to balance out enrollment, and next year Hollywood School would have too many kids in first grade and no place for an additional first grade classroom.
First Avenue is a big physical barrier and many parents don’t want their elementary school kids crossing such a busy street.
Jennifer Leimberer, a Hollywood School parent who is running for the school board in the April election, says since the Hollywood neighborhood is physically separated from the rest of the district by First Avenue, there needs to be another solution to handle the problem of increasing enrollment. She believes that kids who live in Hollywood should attend Hollywood School.
“I think Hollywood needs a different solution than what they have,” Leimberer said. “It’s on the other side of First Avenue. It has its own enrollment issues. Cut us off from the flexible boundaries.”
Leimberer advocates opening up a second section of kindergarten at Hollywood School and thinks the district should explore using or acquiring the Hollywood Community House adjacent to the school to create additional classroom space.
In addition, Leimberer feels Hollywood School should not be subject to the same enrollment caps as other schools in the district, and that class sizes should be looked at on a case-by-case basis rather than be subject to strict numerical limits.
“I think you have to make a decision as to whether there are too many kids in a class based on the class, not based on the numbers,” Leimberer said. “Right now they’re making all those decisions as if kids are cans of soup.”
Tim Young believes that allowing a few more kids into Hollywood classrooms would not damage educational quality.
“I don’t see any difference between 26 and 23 [kids in a class],” Young said.
Some Hollywood parents say that the district could hire teachers’ aides to help handle larger classes.
But Lamberson said that all schools in the district must be treated equally.
“If optimal class sizes hover around 20 at the primary grades they should hover around 20 at all the schools, not three of the four,” Lamberson said.
Lamberson said that district policy is to never require the separation of siblings. If one child in a family cannot attend his or her home school because of enrollment caps, then any siblings have the option of also attending the school that their sibling is being sent to.
“A family will never be separated by the district,” Lamberson said. “The family may be separated by their own choice.”
But Young, who has a fifth-grader at Hollywood School and a kindergarten student at Central, said that when his kids were registered his wife was not given the choice to send their fifth grader to Central. But Young admits he and his wife probably wouldn’t have sent their fifth-grader to Central anyway.
Parents say that if you send all your kids to a school other than your home school you, as a practical matter, forfeit any chance of having your children return to the home school because preference in transfers back to the home school is given to students who have siblings already at the school.