Chicago Public Schools officials say that student overpopulation at Abraham Lincoln Elementary School will likely be remedied by new enrollment boundaries — a solution that doesn’t sit well with parents and faculty at the coveted North Side school.

Lincoln Elementary, a high-performing kindergarten through eighth grade public school at 615 W. Kemper Place, currently enrolls 742 students in a building with an “ideal” capacity of 630, according to the CPS. At its current growth rate, they predict that Lincoln’s student population will rise to 917 by the 2014-2015 school year.

At that point, the agency expects that 98 percent of students at the school will come from families living within Lincoln’s current boundaries, boarded roughly by Fullerton Avenue, Halsted Street, North Avenue and Lake Michigan in the city’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. That territory holds six public schools, including Newberry Math & Science Academy to the south and Oscar Mayer Magnet to the west, giving it more student capacity than most parts of the city.

At a school council meeting on Tuesday night, CPS officials told families and teachers at Lincoln that the district was looking at tightening the school’s boundaries to counter its growing congestion issues.

“It has got to change, as we know,” said CPS Chief Administrative Officer Tim Cawley. “You guys are bursting at the seams, and we need to find a relief valve.”

The new enrollment territory would be defined by a border along Armitage Avenue, and students living south of the street who were once eligible to attend Lincoln would be reassigned to the LaSalle Language Academy, a much sought-after magnet school at 1734 N. Orleans St. LaSalle, which currently enrolls 577 students, could be dissolved as a magnet school to accommodate local students from homes south of Armitage.

Under the plan, Cawley said, siblings of current students at Lincoln would be given preference to enroll at the school, while the new boundary would take effect at one grade level per year. CPS expects the change to reduce the number of incoming students at Lincoln by one-half over the next few years.

Following that change, resources at LaSalle would be subject to review “as part of a citywide evaluation,” said Cawley.

Cawley said that the school board would probably reach a decision on the new boundary by January.

In the spectrum of budget cuts, turnarounds and school closings that have come to define the school board’s yearly proceedings, the funneling of would-be Lincoln students into LaSalle may not seem like such a sour deal.

Nearly all students at both Lincoln and LaSalle meet or exceed state testing standards, and the latter receives over a thousand applications a year from students across the Chicago.

Be that as it may, Lincoln Principal Mark Armendariz said that the community at Lincoln had two good reasons for opposing the new boundaries.

“Many people have purchased homes in this attendance area specifically to come to Lincoln,” he said. “Number two, we want to keep the racial and socioeconomic diversity that we hold near and dear to our hearts. It’s not what we want, it’s what we need.”

The school’s student population is 63. 3 percent white, 11.5 percent black and 9.3 percent Hispanic, according to data from the Illinois State Board of Education.

Armendariz appealed for CPS to consider alternatives to the new boundaries, such as expanding Lincoln’s campus by renovating the vacant James Mulligan Elementary School at 1855 N. Sheffield or bidding for space in the upcoming redevelopment of Children’s Memorial Hospital, located a block from the school.

“We have no intention of adding capacity in this neighborhood, where there are 4,000 seats and 1,500 school-age children,” said Cawley. “We won’t start negotiating with Children’s … we won’t look at Mulligan, we have no intention of doing any of that.”

One resident said that, as a parent with multiple school-age children, he was wary that the plan would leave him vulnerable enrolling his students next year.

“By your own deadline, we have until Friday to decide where my son is going to go to school next year, if, for a variety of reasons, we choose not to send our daughter to LaSalle,” he said. “We need to know tonight if I need to fill out an application for him for a new school next year.”

Cawley said that his administration was currently “weighing the benefits” of the options for families south of the future Armitage border, but stopped short of making any guarantees that the new boundary could keep siblings together in the same school.

“Fill out the application,” he said.

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By Alex Asali from Lincoln
Posted: 02/12/2012 12:00 PM

Have there even any updates to this story?