COLLINSVILLE, Ill. — On the first day of a new school year for students, parents and staff in Collinsville Community Unit School District 10 and students at Dorris Intermediate School will be greeted by a new classroom addition.
Principal Kevin Stirnaman said there are 850 students enrolled this year at Dorris. This will be their first experience with eight new classrooms.
Stirnaman said in the past they had some teachers teaching in non-classroom spaces, but now every teacher has a designated space. That means four new fifth-grade classrooms and a new bathroom on the first floor, and four new sixth-grade classrooms and a bathroom on the second floor.
Each classroom will be home to between 23-28 students.
Stirnaman said the additions were paid for not by a bond issue, but through a combination of existing district and state/federal funds.
He said attention on this first day of classes will turn toward traffic flow, and students and staff getting adjusted to their new space.
Stirnaman said the additions were made necessary by growth in the district.
“The growth ended up coming from not necessarily a growth in enrollment,” he said. “Our enrollment numbers have been fairly consistent over the last years. But rather it was from a change in educational programming. Students that require special services who maybe get some subjects taught to them in some classrooms, but then maybe go to another classroom to receive instruction in other subjects.”
Stirnaman said the majority of staff in the Collinsville district were able to get back in their classrooms on the first of the month. But due to the ongoing construction at Dorris, teachers had to wait another week.
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