Robert Hubbird Takes Over a Lincoln 156 Whose Enrollment Held Steady After Years of Decline

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Correction (September 30, 2026): An earlier version of this article, including its headline, said Lincoln 156's enrollment rose by 31 students, or 4.5 percent, in 2025-26, ending seven straight declines. That comparison mixed two differently defined state counts. Measured on the same state count for both years, enrollment held flat at 717. The earlier version also overstated the eighth-grade increase (it was 22 students, not 29) and said seven of eight classes grew as they moved up a grade; on a consistent count, three did, for a net gain of four students. The long-term trend is now stated through 2024-25 on a single count.

Robert Hubbird was a student when a school told him he was finished.

"I was called into the principal’s office and told I was being expelled for falsifying my residency," he wrote in answers to The ILEdTribune. He said he had completed an accounting program early and expected to earn college credit. "At the time, I was thriving," he wrote. "Yet at that moment, none of it seemed to matter."

He runs a school district now. Hubbird is the superintendent of the Lincoln district^↗ in Calumet City, a pre-kindergarten through eighth grade district that reported all of its students at a single school in 2025-26. The Illinois State Board of Education's Illinois Report Card names him the district's current superintendent, and the district's April 2026 announcement introduced him as its incoming superintendent. His first school year in the job is the one now underway, and the state has not published it yet.

The year before he got there, the district's enrollment stopped falling.

The district enrolled 717 students in 2025-26, the most recent school year in the state's published data. On the state's fall count, which records each student under the home district responsible for them, that is the same number as the year before. The flat year followed four straight declines on the same count, from 822 students in 2020-21.

The long arc comes from a second state series, the report card count, which is defined differently and runs back further. It shows seven straight reported declines through 2024-25. On that count the district enrolled 1,024 students in 2014-15, peaked at 1,040 in 2016-17, and fell to 686 in 2024-25, a loss of 338 students, or 33.0 percent, against a statewide drop of 10.0 percent over the same span. The two counts do not agree even for the same year (for 2024-25, 686 on the report card and 717 on the fall count), so the chart draws them as separate lines and this article never subtracts one from the other. Illinois published no district enrollment file for 2017-18, so the report card line breaks there rather than crossing a year the state never reported.

Our written questions to Hubbird described 2025-26 as an increase, which is how the state's file first read before the comparison was put on a single count. He answered about the community rather than the count.

"We are very encouraged by the increase in enrollment. We believe it reflects the strength of our community and the confidence families have in L156," he wrote. "As a smaller district, we have the unique ability to know our students and families personally while still providing strong academic programs, extracurricular opportunities, and individualized support."

The grade file shows where the movement was, and it is not where a growing district would show it.

Eighth grade went from 72 students in 2024-25 to 94 in 2025-26, a jump of 22, in a year when the district total did not change at all. Most of that is one large class moving up from seventh grade, not new arrivals.

Following each class forward makes the point. Of the eight groups that moved up a grade between 2024-25 and 2025-26, three were bigger than the grade below them had been a year earlier and five were smaller, for a net of four students. The class moving into sixth grade added nine, and the class that became eighth graders added four. Pre-kindergarten is left out of that count, because the program is not universal here and a kindergarten class larger than the prior year's pre-K class would say nothing about who stayed.

The grade spine also shows a pressure on the next total, though not its result. The largest class in the 2025-26 file was the 94 eighth graders who finished that school year. Kindergarten had 70 students and pre-kindergarten had 47. Every grade from first through fifth was in the sixties or low seventies. The state has not yet published the following year's enrollment, so these class sizes cannot establish what happened to the district total after that eighth-grade class left.

Nearly every student in the district was counted as low income on the state's measure: 714 of 717, or 99.6 percent, in 2025-26. On the report card count, the district's reported rate jumped 14.9 points in a single year, from 84.1 percent in 2019-20 to 99.0 percent in 2020-21, and stayed at or above 99 percent through 2024-25.

The Illinois report-card glossary defines low income using benefit receipt, designated circumstances and eligibility for free or reduced-price meals. The series does not show what caused the abrupt rise in the district's classification rate, so it cannot establish a poverty trend across that break.

The other groups are smaller and steadier. In 2025-26 the district identified 154 students, 21.5 percent, as English learners, and 87 students, 12.1 percent, received special education services. Those two groups overlap and cannot be added together. By race and ethnicity the state published two categories, 385 Black students at 53.7 percent and 318 Hispanic students at 44.4 percent, and withheld six. The published categories account for 98.0 percent of enrollment, so both shares are floors rather than measurements, and the missing 2.0 percent stays a gap.

Asked what his promise to students looks like in practice this year, Hubbird gave a one-word answer and then repeated it.

"The district theme is ELEVATE! Our promise is that every student will have what they need to succeed," he wrote. "So in order to do that, we need to ELEVATE everything we do just a little bit so that we can improve how we serve our students emotionally and academically. We need to be reflective on our practices and procedures to get better each and every day."

He came back to the expulsion at the end of his first answer, and that is where he put the point he wanted made.

"What felt like an ending was actually a beginning. That moment didn’t stop my future—it redirected it. It ultimately set me on the path to becoming the Superintendent of Schools I am today," he wrote. He connected that experience to the empathy he brings to his work with students.

"Ultimately, our focus is not simply on growing enrollment—it is on ensuring that every student who walks through our doors feels known, supported, challenged, and prepared for success," he wrote of the year ahead.

The district he inherited is well below where it stood a decade ago, and its largest class in the latest published year finished eighth grade before he took the job. Enrollment also stopped falling, holding flat in a school year that ended before he took the job. The 2026-27 count, whenever the state publishes it, will be the first one that belongs to him.

Enrollment, grade, school and student-group figures come from the Illinois State Board of Education, which publishes no district enrollment file for 2017-18. Dr. Robert G. Hubbird's quotes are from his written answers to The ILEdTribune in September 2026. His account of being told he was being expelled, and of his coursework at the time, is his own.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

the Lincoln district - EdTribune IL - Illinois Education Data

Robert Hubbird Takes Over a Lincoln 156 Whose Enrollment Held Steady After Years of Decline