Yorkville schools projected to add more than 800 students over next 5 years

With a massive facility upgrade on the horizon, Yorkville School District 115 funded a demographic study to see how prepared or unprepared their current buildings are for future enrollment growth.

By 2029-2030, an extra 825 students are projected by the study conducted by RSP & Associates. This growth poses significant problems to the district’s current classroom buildings.

The study found several current buildings are “not adequate for current and projected enrollment.” With growth uneven across the district, the schools with inadequate space now are Yorkville High School, Yorkville Middle School, Yorkville Grade Center, Grande Reserve, Circle Grade Center, and Bristol Bay Elementary.

The district is currently in the process of designing four options, two that increase taxes, for facility master plan upgrades across several of the district’s buildings. The proposals involve building new schools and expanding current buildings’ classroom spaces.

The options being evaluated by a steering committee range from around $159 million to $281 million. A public referendum to approve one of the more costly options is the most likely outcome given the severity of the district’s classroom capacity crisis.

Housing boom

The main culprit is the community’s major population growth and explosion in new housing developments. District officials have voiced concerns at several city council meetings.

In the past five years, almost 2,000 housing units have been added to the district, nearly surpassing the total of the entire previous decade. From 2015-2024, there were 2,045 single-family homes built and 622 multi-family homes constructed.

In 2024 alone, 168 single-family units were built and 93 multi-family units were constructed.

Another 9,000 housing units are identified for potential development within the next decade by the study. Three-thousand of these are currently in developmental phases.

District enrollment growth has followed the trend in new housing with a three-year average growth rate of 203 new students per year, or 2.9% growth rate, according to the study.

The district’s student enrollment jumped from 6,356 in 2021-2021 to 7,309 students in 2025.

According to an analysis of the current school buildings, the total absolute capacity is 7,942 students pre-K through high school. With the additional projected 825 students by 2029-2030, the population would burgeon to 8,134 total students.

The four facility master plan upgrades take the district’s uneven population growth trends into account. The areas of Bristol Bay Elementary and Autumn Creek Elementary have experienced the most significant recent growth and are projected to continue.

The uneven growth led the district to implement a policy to bus over-capacity students at certain schools to other schools within the district that can better handle their addition. The district is also constructing three polebarn classroom structures to temporarily house over-flow elementary students.

The demographic study also highlights the district’s needs to accommodate English language learning (ELL) students.

In 2021, the district had 384 students requiring ELL services. By 2025, that number jumped to 630 students.

To keep up with the increase, the district recently approved adding a full-time English language teacher for the Early Childhood Center which was previously without one.

The district also recently adopted practices to recruit and maintain their staff, including increasing substitute daily pay, and providing stipends and funded college coursework for teachers.