The Hancock-Henderson Quill, Inc.
by David Grimes-Correspondent
Voters in four Hancock County school districts will have one more issue to decide when they go to the polls April 5 to vote whether a four-way high school convergence plan will best meet the educational needs of their students.
Voters in the LaHarpe, Nauvoo-Colusa, Dallas City and Carthage school districts will decide whether to merge their four high schools and if they want to do so by approving an $18 million construction bond.
Voters also will decide whether to approve the building bond question even if it takes up to three years to construct a new high school.
The convergence proposal is the result of declining student enrollment, declining assessed valuation figures and deteriorating financial assistance at the state and federal levels for the four school districts.
For the past year, the Committee of 10 studying the possibility of a high school convergence has crunched numbers regarding student population, curriculum possibilities, staffing needs and building usage.
At Thursday's information meeting at the Nauvoo-Colusa Junior/Senior High School, the wait-and-see option was introduced. The four districts made application in 2004 for capital development board funding that would provide roughly $8 million of the total project cost.
But the state's slowness in putting together a budget for 2005 last summer retarded notification about building project funding to schools on the CDB waiting list. Committee members said local lawmakers Rich Myers and John Sullivan have voiced support for the proposed school merger and for awarding the requested state funding.
If voters approve convergence but vote down the building bond measure, high school students would be sent to two separate attendance centers, one for freshmen and sophomore students and another for juniors and seniors.
Locations for the attendance centers have yet to be determined.
Additionally, district voters will select candidates for the four respective boards of education in the event the merger issue does not pass, candidates to serve on the new high school district in the event convergence is approved and candidates to serve on the four newly created elementary district boards if the four high schools merge.
The Committee of 10 also fielded questions about land values, location of the proposed new school and extracurricular programs.
The proposed new high school would include 1,800- to 2,000-square-foot labs, a 1,600-square-foot gym, classrooms averaging 900 square feet, and have the capability of offering on-site vocational and special needs courses.
The new high school's student population would be about 500.