The Prairie Central Primary West elementary school in Chenoa will be replaced by a new centralized school in Fairbury in three years.
Earlier this month, voters in Prairie Central approved a referendum allowing the school district to borrow $38 million for necessary facility upgrades, including the new elementary school.
In Chenoa’s two precincts, 85% of voters voted against the measure. But they were outnumbered by those in favor elsewhere in the district, primarily in Livingston County. It passed with 57.7% of the overall vote, or around 559 votes.
The same measure failed in November when residents in Chenoa — about 20 miles northeast of Bloomington-Normal, in McLean County — also voted heavily against it. Both times, sentiment in Chenoa was that passing the tax would mean closing the school that currently enrolls pre-K through first graders.
Prairie Central Superintendent Paula Crane said the school district will close that school — as well as the elementary schools in Chatsworth and Fairbury — to make plans for a larger, centralized elementary school in Fairbury.
A key reason given for passing the measure was to solve a complicated transportation situation in the district.
“You might have a family that lives, say, between Forrest and Chatsworth, we only send one bus to pick that family up, right? But you might have students that are in three or four different school buildings from that one family, right? And so you could also have students that are in three towns from that one family,” said Crane.
“So, what we're hoping is by centralizing everybody's sort of going in one direction, right? Everybody from the west is going east and everybody from the east is going west.”
Crane added it's going to lead to more time on the bus for Chenoans, but it will be less time for other students in the district.
“What the board had to look at was the overall perspective of all of the towns and all of the students,” said Crane. “Fairbury makes up about 44% of our population. Currently, we are busing all of the Fairbury pre-K, kindergarten and first graders over to Chenoa. They make up a very large percent of that school.”
By comparison, she said only 20% of the student population will come to Fairbury from Chenoa.
Meetings, where all Chenoa residents were invited to attend, were held leading up to the April 1 vote to explain what the tax levy would mean for the district.
Spencer Shipley, a father from Chenoa who attended the meetings, said community members in favor of consolidation argued that having kids together at younger grades was a plus for the district.
“It's not that I thought that the referendum itself was the worst idea. I just wanted to see if there was an option where every town would have a school and we'd still solve the busing issue,” said Shipley on why he opposed the referendum.
Crane said the school didn’t get accurate information out to the public for the vote in November when the same proposal failed.
“Sometimes when you're so engrossed in it, you just think people know what you know,” she said. “So, we really felt like we didn't do a great job of engaging the community with the information so that when they go to the ballots, their decision is an educated decision.”
The primary school building is all that is left from when Chenoa had its own school district, which was consolidated by Prairie Central in 2004. Craig Bertsche graduated from what was then Chenoa High School in 1988.
“There were hard feelings back then, I know, back in 2004 with some of the direction, but I think those have healed over time,” said Bertsche.
“Sometimes when you're finally faced with the reality, it's really hard to take. And I imagine there are some people who maybe feel disappointed they weren't able to convince the school board to change path and keep the Chenoa grade school open. But you know, it's a challenging time, and that's just the challenges our schools and our administrators face in the state of Illinois these days," he said.
Crane said the school board issued $7 million in bonds in January, meaning there was that much less in bonds on the ballot in April compared to the $45 million in November.
Prairie Central also will receive an estimated $350,000 to $400,000 in tax revenue from the countywide sales tax that also passed on April 1.
“So just like when we were collecting from Livingston County, we use that money on all of our facilities, even our facility that's in McLean County,” said Crane.
Bertsche said it would be hard to say whether there could be some population loss in Chenoa because of the school’s demise. Population has decreased by just shy of 150 residents since the school district consolidation in 2004.
“You'd think it would go down some. Hopefully, it's minimized by just the fact that, with remote work and people being able to travel farther, and maybe with the housing issues and Bloomington-Normal, maybe they can find some more affordable housing in Chenoa,” said Bertsche.
Crane doesn't think Chenoa will lose residents to Fairbury when the change happens.
“It depends on, is there going to be a place for people to build houses, or are people going to want to build houses here?" she said. "Right now, none of our towns really have houses available for people. We're really ... that's a deficit area for us in all of these towns.”
