DeWitt, Iowa: School board looking to solve overcrowding issue
DeWITT, Iowa — For nearly two years, the Central Community School Board has been facing the same dilemma.
The district’s only elementary school is overcrowded. Enrollment in the district continues to decline, making it difficult to justify the construction of a new school building, and the district won’t have the money to build a new school building for at least five years.
“We feel like we’re between a rock and a hard place,” said school board member Dona Bark at Wednesday’s board meeting.
The board discussed its 20-year facilities plan on Wednesday. Board member Dennis Campbell said the board had four options of what to do about the overcrowding at Ekstrand, which has a current enrollment of about 625 students.
Campbell said the board could do nothing for now and continue to use modular classrooms, including a third classroom trailer that will be added next year.
The board could also decide to build a new school, add on to the existing school, or move some Ekstrand students to another building.
Campbell said he believed the only financially viable options right now would be standing pat or moving some students out. It is the latter proposal, specifically to move fifth-grade students to Central Community Middle School, that has some Ekstrand teachers upset.
More than 40 Ekstrand staff members signed a letter to the board asking that the fifth-graders not be moved to the middle school.
“As educators, we do not think that a Middle School setting is appropriate for 10-year-olds,” the letter read. “We do not need to put students in to (sic) an environment that those students may not be ready for maturity wise (sic).”
Campbell said of the options available, moving some students to another building seemed to make the most sense.
“I believe that’s the most economical, fiscally responsible, educationally appropriate response,” he said.
Bark said she would like to see the district build a second attendance center. This could break up the elementary school grades into two buildings, one for kindergarten through second-grade and one for third- through fifth-grade.
But with enrollment declining in the district, county and state, she didn’t know how the district could pay for it. She said a cooperative agreement with neighboring districts could be another solution to the problem.
Board member Jim Irwin said the district wouldn’t be able to pay for a new building until 2012, and that could come at the expense of other projects in the district. He said it made more sense to move the fifth-grade students to another building than to build a new one.
The board will continue to study the issue and does not expect to make a decision in the near future.
Steven Martens can be contacted at
(563) 659-2595 or smartens@qctimes.com.
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