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URBANA — After months of debate and discussion among community and board members alike, more big changes are coming to Urbana schools.
By a 4-3 margin at the end of a four-hour meeting, Urbana’s school board voted in favor of making Yankee Ridge the district’s sole dual-language elementary building, housing students enrolled in both the Spanish and French programs.
The decision, reached late Tuesday night, came six months after another 4-3 vote that divided district residents — to convert Wiley Elementary (closed in 2023-24 for asbestos abatement) into Illinois’ lone sixth-grade learning center.
The Wiley transformation won’t take effect until 2025-26; Yankee Ridge’s new look will begin this fall.
The decision to consolidate the elementary-level Spanish dual-language program into one building was reached in January, by a 5-2 margin. Tuesday night’s vote paved the way for the French program to join it in the same building — Yankee Ridge, where the latter program is currently based.
First-year board member Citlaly Stanton, a Mexican immigrant, voted in favor of the consolidation, along with Tori Exum, Lola Jones and Sheri Langendorf.
“Having the dual-language program together is a better opportunity for us to grow as a community,” Stanton said, “to learn and also to have all of the services that we need.”
New board appointee Jennifer Hixson voted against the plan, as did President Paul Poulosky and Ben Baxley.
In her first meeting as a member of the board, Hixson initially asked if administrators could push back the vote until after her questions were answered. Superintendent Jennifer Ivory-Tatum replied that they could answer them during the meeting, which led to an hour-long discussion.
“I feel like we haven’t done our due diligence and looked at all the factors that go into this,” Hixson said.
Many of her queries revolved around whether the board had considered the potential impacts of such a decision.
For instance, she wondered if they had adequately planned for growth within the programs and how Spanish-speaking families feel about the dual-language program being located in one school.
Baxley also questioned whether the board had done its due diligence on the plan. He expressed frustration that there’d been no polling of English-speaking families in dual-language programs at Leal and Dr. Williams elementary schools, to find out if they’d choose to remain in the revised program.
Ivory-Tatum replied that it would have been hard for parents to provide input without a clear indication of which school their students would be going to and what the plan would look like.
“That seems like an unknown that we need to know,” Baxley said. “Because if we have a lot of families at Leal that say ‘I don’t want to go anywhere other than Leal,’ that’s going to throw off numbers. That’s not going to throw off numbers, that’s going to toss numbers right out the car window when you’re driving down the highway.”
There were two concept plans presented as part of the redistricting process. The one that was approved was Concept 1.
According to a presentation from educational planning firm RSP & Associates, the plan reduces boundary islands to create more “neighborhood-centric boundaries” and addresses over-capacity issues at Dr. Williams.
In Concept 1, 352 K-4 students — 20.9 percent of the population — could be potentially impacted, the firm found. Forty-one of those students went to Wiley before it was closed and are now enrolled at Yankee Ridge.
Concept 2 would have seen Thomas Paine Elementary — not Yankee Ridge — transition into the district’s dual-language school. That plan also would have addressed boundary island and Dr. Williams capacity issues.
It was estimated to impact 381 K-4 students, or 22.6 percent of the population, including 115 former Wiley Elementary students who currently attend Thomas Paine.
Speaking Wednesday evening as a board member but not for the board, Poulosky said he understood why the majority voted the way it did, pointing out that the bigger plan solves two equity-related issues the district has wrestled with, including the displacement of “hundreds of kids” in the Dr. Williams neighborhood.
“But,” he told The News-Gazette, “it is also true that instead of following an overarching course of action, this district has been navigating from crisis to crisis, being forced to make increasingly unpopular changes in order to address issues, real problems that had been ignored to the point where they had grown into crises.
“These big decisions, these huge changes in direction, are being chosen without all of the details specified ahead of time. I do have confidence that all of our staff, teachers and administrators will be able to successfully implement the direction the board has voted on. They are all incredibly hard-working and devote their lives to the betterment of Urbana’s children.
“But there is a huge cost to making decisions the way we have the past few years. We have lost the trust of much of the public and many of our staff members.”
The “cost in public trust,” Poulosky said, was too great for him to vote “yes.”
“Acting as we have, we have alienated many of the people we need in order to be a successful district,” he said. “The district has multiple challenges facing it that have no quick fix, and we need to partner with the people of Urbana if we have any hope of addressing them.
“The educational outcomes of many of our children are woefully behind their peers in other districts, the issues surrounding climate and culture in our buildings are making it nearly impossible for our dedicated teachers to do their work, the financial limitations we are under make it exceedingly challenging to retain and recruit licensed teachers to our district, just to name three.
“We desperately need a strategic plan to tackle these problems, and we need the help of the very people we have alienated over the past few years in order to build a workable plan. I sincerely hope that we can convince our families and community to engage with us in this endeavor.
“And for my part in putting the district where it is today, I want to apologize to the people of Urbana. We can, and will do better.”
