(This week’s civic education and engagement column from Danville’s The Republican newspaper.)
When you’re an elected official for 23 years, you make a lot of decisions both large and small. Most of the time, you’re confident you’ve made the right call. But there are some you come to regret. One decision our school board made stands out in my mind. I can’t call it a bad decision, because it was done for the right reasons and achieved the stated goals. Yet it simply turned out to be the wrong call for our community.
In 2003, our board was focused on Plainfield’s future. While the town wasn’t growing as quickly as Avon and Brownsburg, our student population had been increasing at a steady 2 to 3 percent, and we knew it was only a matter of time before things became crowded. At the time, we operated a high school, a middle school, and three elementary schools, along with a kindergarten center in a wing of the high school. The schools were rapidly approaching capacity, and the state’s expected shift to full-day kindergarten would immediately double the need for kindergarten classrooms.
Most Indiana school districts address facility needs as they crop up, but we wanted to be more proactive and create a long-term plan for the inevitable growth. We assembled a task force of 13 community members, students, and teachers. The task force represented a variety of personalities with individual perspectives on the town and its schools. Our plan was to feed them data so they could make recommendations to help us plan for the next two decades.
The task force stunned us by suggesting we build a new high school and kindergarten center, convert the existing PHS into a middle school, and convert the current middle school into an elementary school. We adopted their recommendation with two adjustments: we decided to turn the current middle school into an “upper elementary” that would serve all of Plainfield’s fourth- and fifth-graders. The three elementary schools would shift to the primary grades. We also decided to use the newly vacant classrooms to move the kindergarten classes into the three primary schools, rather than build another kindergarten center.
One of the factors behind that decision was a constant morale issue among our district’s fourth- and fifth-grade teachers. Student populations fluctuate every year, and it never failed that one of the elementary schools would wind up with substantially larger 4th and 5th grade classes than the other two. One school’s 5th grade teachers might average 28 kids, while the others had just 21. The next year, the numbers would shift, moving the bigger numbers to another school. Teachers with smaller classes never griped, but we always knew who had the most kids.
At the time, the state provided extra funding that helped us keep class sizes in primary grades manageable, but no extra dollars were available for older students. By moving the 4th and 5th grade teachers to a single school, we could balance their class sizes. In addition, the middle school was a larger building that was better-suited for bigger kids, with less need to resize furniture and fixtures (like bathrooms) for younger ones. The upper elementary concept seemed like a smart solution.
Clarks Creek Elementary opened in 2008 and worked exactly as we thought it would. Well, except for an issue we didn’t anticipate. Plainfield’s elementary schools have long been known for an amazing level of family loyalty and parent involvement. The now K-3 schools continued that tradition. But the 4-5 school … well, not so much. Despite the best efforts of the principal, teachers, and PTO leaders, parent participation was significantly lower. Students were only there for two years, so families didn’t develop long-term attachments to the school, and student enthusiasm was much weaker than what we were accustomed to.
We eliminated the upper elementary concept in 2012 and made all four schools K-5. In a remarkably short time, we watched the same level of school spirit and parent participation develop at Clarks Creek.
Did we make the wrong decision? I don’t think so, given the reasoning and our goals. We just didn’t foresee the unintended consequence of less emotional involvement. When we opened Guilford Elementary as our fifth K-5 school in 2021, the lessons we learned from Clarks Creek helped us establish a strong parent presence and strong student spirit from the first day. So yes, we learned from our mistakes … although I wish we’d made a different choice in the first place.