GRANADA – With their bond referendum passed, the Granada- Huntley- East Chain (GHEC) School Board took time at its meeting on Thursday to look toward the future.

It started with discussing the building bond updates. Superintendent Doug Storbeck said from this point, they will continue their project oversight committee. He said it will consist of three board members and five to six staff members.

“We will be reaching out to specific areas like particularly the kitchen, Career and Technical Education,” Storbeck said. “Just to gather their input through this process.”

In speaking to ICS, Storbeck said getting anything major done in this upcoming summer is not a realistic goal.

“We might be able to get some components of the overall bond done, but the overall project will not be completed until fall of 2027,” he said.

Looking to next school year, Storbeck commented on potential changes to the school schedule and days per week students are in school.

“We’re looking at some options of kind of thinking outside the box,” he said. “We’re going to do some internal communication with our staff to really make sure that we have total buy-in moving forward before we present anything to our community.”

Currently, the third grade is split up into two sections. Moving forward, Storbeck said they are looking to combine those two sections of students when they move onto the fourth grade. With a teacher slot opened by this, Storbeck said they would like to split the kindergarten into two separate sections, capped at 12 students a section.

“The thought process behind doing that is really putting a significant amount of resources early on in the elementary years to provide more individual and small group instruction,” he said. “Eventually, some people talked about, well, that might be useful in the first grade as well. I don’t disagree, but we still have limited resources that we have to talk about.”

In order to cap the sections at 12 students per, Storbeck said they would have to limit open enrollment.

“We would likely have to go through a lottery process for that if we had too many open enrollees into our kindergarten,” he said. “If we’re really trying to get to that 12, and obviously 12 becomes 24 eventually. I feel like if we have 12 to 24 and consistently 24 in each class, that’s a pretty good number.”

Storbeck said they would not be acting on this on Thursday’s meeting, but he was looking to get a sense of how the board felt about the potential change. Board Member Brad Mattson said he agreed with the potential change.

Board Member Ross Gronewald asked about what would happen if the teacher for one section is free due to both sections having a shared class, like music. Storbeck said that is generally when teachers have their prep time, so it would be used for that.

In other news:

— The board voted to begin limiting enrollment for grades 3-12 in this school year. Superintendent Doug Storbeck said that for their projections, these grades have a relatively large number of students. Storbeck said there were questions that could be raised about closing grades six and seven, as well as 11 and 12, due to potential spots for students moving during the school year. Ultimately, they decided to move forward with limiting enrollment through grades 3-12 with no adjustments.

— On the students’ side, Student Representative for the school board Phoebe Madsen said the first quarter of school just ended, and she thinks students are good at getting caught up on their grades as they roll into the second quarter. She said the school’s trunk and treat program for Halloween was a success, with over 350 people in attendance.