Blazing New Trails - Connexions

Experiences with PTELL in Six Illinois School Districts: Leadership Perceptions and Student Performance 291
You can just look right here in the vocational areas we have in this school. We
have an unbelievable shop area for Home Economics and Woodworking.
Those areas aren’t required by the state, so they were just cut. In a blue-collar
area, how do you make that cut? If you remove early vocational experiences
before they go into high school, they aren’t as prepared as they should be to
make some choices about their high school courses. Look at the gifted
program. The state requirement for this was written off the books, so it was
cut.
For the great majority of school districts in the study, students did not lose any
curricular choices, non-instructional programs, or extra-curricular activities when PTELL
went into effect. That alone served as the basis of the perception that, in most districts,
students had not suffered any ill effects due to the tax limitation.
Lack of expansion of the instructional program. The reverse side of the seemingly
positive outlook on what PTELL has meant for students was that there was not a great deal of
growth in the instructional program in the majority of the school districts in the study. The
superintendent in the only district that boasted any expansion of programming stressed that
only the steady growth in EAV the district realized from new construction each year made
that possible, but that still characterized any additions as “thoughtful and frugal.” For the
majority of school districts, school leaders perceived resources as uncertain and limited,
making impossible the expansion of any programs. School leaders reported expending a great
deal of energy to provide resources to continue the current instructional and non-instructional
programs for students.
Anything new for students came at the price of discontinuing something that already
existed. One school principal confided, “We have a curriculum rule; we don’t add a class
without dropping one….so, students don’t have the options they used to have without
PTELL.” Another principal said, “With the resource limitation we have, we can’t develop
new programs.” School leaders focused on maintaining what was offered students while
trying to build cash reserves for what they perceived as an uncertain fiscal future under
PTELL.
Increased class sizes. Leaders in three of the districts indicated that class sizes were
larger under PTELL than before PTELL’s adoption. There was a perception that the districts
could not afford to add staff, classrooms, or both. In two of the districts, student enrollment
was increasing causing the overcrowding of classes. In one of those districts, a high school
district near a large industrial community, classroom space was available but adding teachers
was not seen as a possibility. The school leader in this district shared that most of the
academic classes had rosters of 30 students and that the classes serving the students most
academically at-risk had 22 to 24 students. He expressed concern that the higher than optimal
class sizes would start impacting performance on the state assessment.
In the other school system, which was an elementary district, the school board’s
priority on low class sizes in the primary grades was ignored since there were not enough
resources to pay for additional teachers in those grade-levels. Attempts in the past to keep
primary class sizes in keeping with the school board’s expectations of not adding teachers led
to large class sizes in the upper grades, which remained over 30 for most academic classes at
the time of the study. The superintendent in this district also expressed concern over what