The Oak Park and River Forest High School Board of Education approved adding a fulltime psychologist and 1.3 FTE teachers to aid in next year’s needs.
In a 6 to 1 vote, the board added the teachers to help keep class sizes low and to teach an incoming freshman class that is expected to be 70 students larger than this year’s.
The cost of the new hires is estimated to be $199,000. The additions will bring the total of certified staff at OPRF to 229.3 FTE.
School board president Tom Cofsky cast the lone vote against approving the new positions, saying that he is concerned that staff has increased significantly at OPRF during the past decade while enrollment has remained nearly flat.
“For me, unfortunately, this is déjà vu all over again,” Cofsky said. “We have increased staff over a decade while enrollment remained flat. Fortunately, we’ve had the resources to support that and it worked.”
But Cofsky complained that the school’s staffing model is not in line with its financial model or its enrollment model.
At the March 7 Committee of the Whole meeting in which the staffing proposal was first discussed, Cofsky noted that staffing had increased far more than enrollment over the past decade.
“We’ve added 56 staff and 15 students in the last 10 years,” Cofsky said.
About .7 FTE of the new teaching staff will be allocated to special education while .6 FTE will be allocated to general education. There will be an increase of 1.2 co-taught classes in math and science in which a special education teacher is paired with a general education teacher.
The additional psychologist will mostly work with special education students, focusing on special education and students with 504 plans who qualify for accommodations based on some sort of disability but who do not qualify for a specialized individual education plan.
“It is necessary to continue our integration of special education and general education supports, and it is an appropriate response to significant growth in 504 needs over the past several years,” according to a memo from four administrators.
According to the memo, the increase in general education staff is a result of increased enrollment and some programmatic shifts including an expansion of college and career pathway programs and the introduction of two new Advanced Placement courses. The school has also been trying to reduce class sizes in its Honors for All freshman curriculum from 26 to 28 students a class to 25 to 25 students per class so the increased number of freshmen next year requires an increase in staff.
The increased number of non-native English speakers at the school is also requiring the school to offer two new classes in United States history and physics/chemistry for non-native English speakers. The number of non-native English speakers at OPRF has increased this year, driven in part by recent migrants to the United States who are now living in Oak Park.
The state of Illinois requires that a school which has 20 or more non-native English speaking students who speak the same language provide a more supportive program including classes just for that group of students so OPRF must beef up its English Language Learner program. Overall approximately one percent of OPRF students are non-native English speakers who need instruction in their native language.