North Hill School's growing problem: How this could have been avoided years ago

For the past few of articles that I read, North Hill School now has a problem with having limited space to have new students attending the school.....again.

http://www.thehawkeye.com/story/Alignment-031412
http://www.thehawkeye.com/story/Burl-school-pre-032612
http://www.thehawkeye.com/story/North-Hill-032712
http://www.thehawkeye.com/story/North-Hill-Lawn-032912

Back in 2009, the school had finished construction of the new school.  The reason why the original school wasn't working had numerous reasons, particularly the lack of space students can attend the school.  The new school capacity, according to Cirriculum Director Laurie Noll, is 350 students.

The problem didn't start occurring this year. In fact, it started occurring in 2010!

This chart was taken from the School Digger website.  The chart was created from using the data from the National Center for Education Statistics and the U.S. Dept. of Education.  The information can be accessed here.  Source

From the opening year of 2009 through 2010, there was a huge leap of students enrolling into the school system.  As far as 2011, I wasn't able to find statistics for that particular year, however the statistic for the current standards now is 452, according to Laurie Noll.


This fluctuation of students have created a similar problem that the Burlington School District should have foreseen and predicted better in order to prevent this from happening again, but failed to do so.  There are couple of reasons that could contributing to this, but I don't believe open enrollment is the sole reason why this is happening.

Open Enrollment

The first reason is the means of open enrollment.  Open enrollment is designed for parents and students to easily pull a student out from one particular school to the next.  This particular approach can be used for different reasons, like a student being bullied and the school refusing to take the course of action necessarily to remove the threat, distance from home to school is too far, friends and/or family attending a different school, lack of unique and helpful classes and materials needed for a healthy education, etc.   I'm all in for open enrollment as it will help students achieve better and healthy success toward an education, as well as making parent's lives simpler and less worrisome.

Here's what Noll has to say about the situation in the March 14th article.

"At North Hill, we have 452 students in that building and capacity is 350," Noll said. "At Black Hawk, there are 395 students in their building and they have a capacity of 500 students." 

Noll said 94 students living within the area bordered by Curran Street on the west, Central Avenue on the east, Division Street on the south and Agency Street on the north could switch schools. 

"Those 94 students, we would like to move from the North Hill area to Black Hawk," she said. "We have a building that is not being utilized to its fullest capacity. We need to have students in Black Hawk so we are utilizing that building." 

By making the proposed moves, Noll said class sizes in the schools will become more balanced. 

"There are kids from different boundaries in different schools," she said. "That needs to be corrected."

The problem I had reading this is that although there is an issue with one school lacking the amount of students, the areas these 94 students are in crime-infested areas.  Reading from many articles from the For the Record reports on criminal behavior, there seems to be a lot of crime on the south end of town than there is on the north side.  Parents who own their share of the 94 students probably can't move out of the area and feel that safety could be one of their main concerns, especially when the students would most likely walk home and to school through unsafe neighborhoods.  It could be other mix of reasons placed in there as well, but we don't know for sure.  Although it is still a problem having a lack of students attending schools like Black Hawk, there are other problems that Noll can realizes about students moving out of their short distances from school.

The problem with open enrollment in this town is that school districts don't research enough to estimate the proper amount of students that wishes to attend a school of their or the parents' choice.  Because of this students and parents have to battle with the school in keeping their child in enrollment, thus making an overwhelming amount of students attending the maximum limit.  The construction of the building should have been better planned out instead of increasing the student amount by a small margin.  This tries to prevent students and parents from seeking open enrollment because it limits students abilities from leaving the school of disinterest.

Parents and students moving into town/schools


Another contributing factor could be parents and students moving into nearby towns around the general Burlington and West Burlington area.  This helps increase the amount of student input.

I don't believe that open enrollment is the sole reason why its contributing to the overflowing problem.  I think its more on the lines of years worth of people moving into the town with their children, increasing the population of students attending the school and the open enrollment. Parents who are moving into the area for employment, healthcare needs, etc.; they are most likely to bring children along for the ride.  Those same parents might move those children to different schools in the general based on their preference and perhaps from word-of-mouth from the other parents or students.

Before the construction of Sunnyside, there were talks about Sunnyside not having enough room to fit enough students in their school.  One of the main contributors that was talked about was students moving in from other cities.  The school first made placements of mobile homes in order to be transformed into classrooms.  Each building was roughly one classroom.  When the population continued to increase, students were moved to different schools in order to start construction of the new Sunnyside school.  After the school was built, there was a large spike of students attending the school, which had more capacity to hold students that the current North Hill School.

A couple or so schools were probably built in the late 80's through the early 90's in order to fix the fluctuation of students going into North Hill school.  Some schools even implemented the mobile home classroom method, including North Hill.  It somewhat fixed the problem until the beginning of 2000 where the increase started to go up for North Hill, which lead to construction of the new school in the same general area.

What would happen now


With the current trend being seen, it will be probably likely that students would be eventually forced to move to other schools to reduce the amount of students coming into the school.  Another thing that could happen is North Hill could start placing new mobile buildings outside nearby the playgrounds, starting an old trend that could have been fixed when the decision of reconstructing the school was made.

With pushing parents and students aside from attending the school of their choice, families affected would be disappointing and have their backs turned from having their opportunity and right to have open enrollment.  Schools are suppose to have everything planned out from the beginning of how much capacity the school should hold instead of placing a limited amount of seating arrangements that would last for only a couple or so years.  I feel that the school district believe that they can demolish and rebuild any of their buildings to make it look more up-to-date when it comes to certain qualities, but never takes much of an account of how many students that could be brought into the school through open enrollment and new city students.

Schools that are affected, like Black Hawk, would lose funding if they continue losing students.  Building schools with limited amounts of seating can limit this rule, which can force parents to enroll into schools they believe isn't fit for their preference, can balance the schools with having the fullest amount of students attended he schools.  Another problem that rises is once the schools are yet again overfilled, both the school district and the city will help pitch in paying the construction fees of building another new school building, repeating the undesired effect of overfilling and limited seating for open enrolled students.