U46 demographer: Race no boundary factor

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

CHICAGO — Demographer Jerome McKibben was more concerned with where stoplights were than minorities when he drew up his recommendations for Elgin School District U46’s 2004 elementary school boundary changes, he said Wednesday.

McKibben’s testimony was part of day three of the racial bias lawsuit trial against the school district, alleging that those boundary changes discriminated against black and Hispanic students. The first phase of the trial, now in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago, deals with allegations those minority students were assigned to overcrowded schools.

McKibben was hired by U46 in October 2003 to create new attendance zone maps for the Elgin school district, he confirmed in court Wednesday. To do that, he made projections and more speculative forecasts for both the population and enrollment growth that likely would occur between 2003 and 2013 in U46, he confirmed. He relied on 2000 U.S. Census figures and his own research, driving around the district, he said.

He looked at traffic patterns, new and existing housing developments, where areas of growth were, where areas of greater density or apartment complexes were and commute times, he said. He did not look at the ethnic and racial makeup of those areas — not even in his personal observations, he said.

“Race and ethnicity really wasn’t a focus of our study, so we didn’t pay much attention to it,” McKibben said.

That data are available, he confirmed. But when he met with then-U46 Superintendent Connie Neale several weeks after he was hired, it wasn’t one of the criteria she gave him for drawing boundaries. He said he also wasn’t asked to take into consideration specific program needs, like the state requirement that English Language Learners have 10 percent fewer students in their classrooms, he said.

But, he added, “I haven’t in any of the projects I’ve worked on in 22 years.”

U46 Transportation Routing and Facility Administrator Amy Cook, who was assistant director of transportation at the time of the boundary changes, and current Superintendent Jose Torres also testified they knew at the time that data regarding the racial and ethnic makeup of schools is available. Torres said while he visited every school in his first semester, he didn’t immediately look into that information, or the makeup of schools that had mobile classrooms, when he became superintendent in 2008.

“There’s lots of data I may not have looked at that first year,” Torres said.

Among that criteria Mc­Kibben said he was given for drawing boundaries was creating neighborhood schools and concise, compact areas, as well as not splitting existing neighborhoods — eliminating as many “satellite pockets” of students being bused to schools across the district as possible, he confirmed. Neale didn’t define what the district meant by neighborhood, and she didn’t name any neighborhoods he specifically should not split, he said.

Stewart Weltman of Futterman Howard Ashley and Weltman, an attorney representing the plaintiffs in the trial, asked the demographer whether he thought going to a neighborhood school model would mean less diversity in those schools.

“It depends on the district,” McKibben said, but he added he didn’t think that it would affect diversity in U46 schools.

When the trial resumes today, Weltman said he plans to call to the witness stand Neale, former Illinois Park Principal Cathy Dunphy and Dan Rich, a former U46 Board of Education member who the attorney said cast the lone vote against the 2004 boundary changes.