75 cents
Breaking news at Daily-Chronicle.com
Serving DeKalb County since 1879
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
GIRLS CROSS COUNTRY • SPORTS, B1
NIU FOOTBALL WRAP
Schrader caps career with her fourth honor
Gameday’s here: Get your Huskie poster today
D-426 passes on change study Hiawatha School District board members were split on proposed feasibility analysis By FELIX SARVER fsarver@shawmedia.com KIRKLAND – Some residents in Hiawatha School District 426 have expressed concerns over the financial health and academic quality of the district, but school board members are not interested in exploring a merger with any neighboring districts.
For the past five years, several residents have urged school officials to find alternative and cost-effective options for improving the district through a feasibility study. Kirkland resident Lisa Upchurch said leaders need to critically examine how the district can optimize tax dollars to give students the best education. The costs of the feasibility study could be shared with partici-
pating districts, she said. “Doing this study has no impact on our taxes,” she said. “Or are we afraid of what the results will show us?” After a meeting that lasted about five hours Monday, school board members voted, 4-2, against commissioning a study of the district. The proposed study would have analyzed every aspect of the district
– from finances to transportation – and compared it with other districts in DeKalb County and Illinois. The study would then have made several recommendations for reorganization, including possible consolidation with another district, such as Sycamore School District 427 or Genoa School District 424. Board members Henry Burgwe-
SAVING SCHOOLHOUSES
ger and Christina Badgley voted for the study. Board president Sharon Miller – along with Tim Hall, Jack Novelli and Mark Wittwer – voted no. Novelli said the study didn’t seem necessary. He said his children attend the school district, which has good schools.
See D-426, page A8
Honoring Gettysburg Address 150 years later By MARK SCOLFORO The Associated Press
Rob Winner – rwinner@shawmedia.com
Bill and Mary Lloyd’s home on the 400 block of Charles Street in Sycamore was originally a schoolhouse named South School.
Buildings survive as homes, teaching tools many years later By DEBBIE BEHRENDS dbehrends@shawmedia.com
L
ocal landscaper Bill Lloyd’s Sycamore home has changed a lot since its early days as a oneroom schoolhouse. The room where the children studied is now his master bedroom. Subsequent owners have expanded the building since it was converted for use as a home, adding a second floor with more bedrooms and expanding it to 4,000 square feet. But signs of its former life remain. “I’ve been here for 11 years,” Lloyd said. “You can tell it was an old schoolhouse because it still has a bell tower. Now, if I just had a bell.” The last one-room schoolhouse in DeKalb County closed in 1957, but some of the buildings remain in use today as homes, historic sites and even a bank’s community room. The former Latimer School, on Rich Road, also is used as a private residence. It is listed for sale, said Mary Keys, marketing director at Resource Bank. According to the locally produced book, “Rural School Journeys: A Legacy of Learning,” Latimer School remains on the property
Monica Maschak – mmaschak@shawmedia.com
The Quilhot schoolhouse has been moved and added to the new Resource Bank location to be repurposed as the bank’s community room in Shabbona. where it was built northwest of DeKalb on Rich Road, west of Annie Glidden Road. Keys said the former Quilhot School serves as the community room in the new Shabbona branch of Resource Bank at 102 S. Indian Road. The building now is a community room.
“When we build a branch, we want to be sure we can offer community space, especially in the smaller communities where public spaces are not readily available,” Keys said. “Schools have so many functions for their spaces. To have an additional public area is an asset for a small community.”
Keys said the Quilhot School was chartered in 1856 as District 4. The school building was closed in 1948 and moved by Miles Quilhot in 1950. More recently, it was used as a shed by the Mullins family. “I find it interesting that the most students in the building at one time was 50, and today as a community room, the occupancy is 49,” Keys said. Two more former schools are being used as teaching tools. Known today as the Milan Township District 83 schoolhouse, the former Tysdal school was moved from the area of Tower and Perry roads to the campus of Northern Illinois University. Closed in 1942, the building was left to deteriorate until it was donated to the Blackwell History of Education Museum in 1996. In the past, the school was available for school field trips to show students a typical day in a oneroom schoolhouse. Richard Casey, director of the learning center at the Blackwell Museum, said the building has not been available for a variety of reasons, including renovation of the learning center.
See SCHOOLHOUSES, page A8
GETTYSBURG, Pa. – In solemnity, thousands of people gathered at a central Pennsylvania battlefield park Tuesday to honor a speech given 150 years ago that President Abraham Lincoln predicted would not be long remembered. The inspirational and famously short Gettysburg Address was praised for reinvigorating national ideals of freedom, liberty and justice amid a Civil War that had torn the country into pieces. “President Lincoln sought to heal a nation’s wounds by defining what a nation should be,” said Gov. Tom Corbett, calling Lincoln’s words superb, his faith deep and his genius profound. “Lincoln wrote his words on paper, but he also inscribed them in our hearts.” Echoing Lincoln, keynote speaker and Civil War historian James McPherson said the president took the dais in November 1863 when it looked as though the nation “might indeed perish from the earth.” “The Battle of Gettysburg became the hinge of fate on which turned the destiny of that nation and its new birth of freedom,” McPherson said. In the July 1863 battle, considered the turning point of the war, Union forces fought back a Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania. Lincoln’s speech was delivered more than four months later, at the dedication of a national cemetery to bury the battle’s dead. In the short oration, he spoke of how democracy itself rested upon “the proposition that all men are created equal,” a profound and politically risky statement for the time. Slavery and the doctrine of states’ rights would not hold in the “more perfect union” of Lincoln’s vision.
See GETTYSBURG, page A8
AP photo
James Getty, portraying President Abraham Lincoln, stands before a ceremony commemorating the 150th anniversary of the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on Tuesday in Gettysburg, Pa.
Inside today’s Daily Chronicle Lottery Local news Obituaries
A2 A3-4 A4
National and world news Opinions Sports
Weather A2, A5-8 A9 B1-4
Advice Comics Classified
C3 C4 D1-3
High:
45
Low:
38