Maddie Harle’s first grade classroom at Irving School in southeast Oak Park only has two walls. Instead of walls on each side of the classroom there are movable dividers, relics from the open classrooms craze that dates to the 1970s. Those dividers are what separates Maddie’ classroom from the two other first grade classrooms at Irving. Harle, who was recently diagnosed with ADHD, says she can hear what is going on in the other classrooms as noise passes through the dividers. The noise sometimes makes it hard to concentrate. Maddie first took her concerns to Irving principal Susan Mura and was told that Oak Park Elementary School District 97 intends to put in walls to divide the classrooms, but not until 2029.
That’s not soon enough for Maddie so the first grader decided to take her concerns to the D97 school board. At the May 12 school board meeting the first grader stood in front of the school board in a room filled with parents and administrators sitting behind her to say her piece. Interim Superintendent Patrick Robinson had to move the lectern out of the way so that school board members could see the diminutive seven-year-old.
“My name is Maddie and I’m in first grade at Irving School,” Maddie said starting off her comment with an introduction. “Can you please put walls in sooner so kids can learn faster and better. It was not very good because I could hear the other classes and it was hard to hear my teacher.”
Maddie had printed, with a couple misspellings, her comment on a sheet of paper that she read from.
Was she nervous about speaking to the school board?
“She wasn’t nervous at all,” said Maddie’s mother Tina Harle. “She was like super excited; she was doing these spins in the lobby beforehand.”
In making a public comment to the school board Maddie was following in the footsteps of her older sister, Annabelle, a seventh grader at Percy Julian Middle School, twice made public comments at school board meetings about middle schoolers not having a long enough lunch period and about the district’s accelerated math program. Annabelle’s lunch comment led to the lunch period being extended from 18 to 19 minutes after the first trimester. And next year the lunch period will add another 4 minutes to total 23 minutes. Annabelle even got an email acknowledging her public comment from then interim superintendent Griff Powell.
“In our house if we have a problem or a complaint then OK you need to come up with a solution. What are you going to do about it,” Tina Harle said.
Making a public comment at the school board meeting was purely Maddie’s idea her mother said.
“It’s affecting enough that she wanted to speak at the board meeting,” Tina Harle said. “This was like all her, like she brought this up out of nowhere. I didn’t even know that it was really a problem, but she brought it up.
According to her mother Maddie can hear what is going on in the other classrooms so clearly that she knows that one class is one day ahead of her class and the other class is one day behind.
A couple of Irving parents who spoke to Wednesday Journal said their kids didn’t seem to have any problems with the noise level in their classrooms but one said that when she was in a first grade classroom for a teacher-parent conference she could hear what was being said in the adjacent classroom through the divider.
Whittier School has a similar configuration in its first grad pod.
District 97 declined to allow Wednesday Journal to visit the classroom and gauge the noise level.