Tuesday evening, the School City of East Chicago held a meeting to address families, after Superintendent Stephen Bournés announced to families that the district is looking to close Carrie Gosch Early Learning Center at the end of the school year.
Bournés said the school corporation will post the one-hour meeting on its website to help communicate to families the closure of East Chicago’s sole public pre-K only facility.
Ranging from parents and staff to to Carrie Gosch attended the meeting, some slamming the school’s decision to close the school and have future students learn at a bigger environment with bigger children, and some mourning the remarkable work done at the little less than decade-old center when it opened its doors as a pre-K facility at the start of the 2017-2018 school year.
Citing concerns of declining enrollment and aging facilities that cast an economic burden across the school district, Bournés said that the average East Chicago school has a price tag of $2 million to operate a year. Bournés said that the school district is looking to find another way to invest those dollars when it closes Carrie Gosch, this time for good, at the end of the school year.
Bournés announced that the biggest changes to the pre-K system is that next year it will mandate that students over 4 years old be toilet trained and that all students reside in East Chicago. The only exception to the toilet-trained rule is if a student has an individualized education program, or IEP.
The new pre-K system will continue to follow the rest of the school system’s transportation routes, in that students who live within a mile of their school will not be provided a bus, Bournés said.
The school board will have an opportunity to formally vote on Carrie Gosch's closure at the upcoming school board meeting on Jan. 27.
