There are two stories in the Journal Star today about District 150 that are curious.
The first one says that the Glen Oak School site isn’t big enough to accommodate all the programs that a building committee recommended. Of course, those recommendations were based on a 15-acre site: according to the district’s Q & A piece, question 13, the “public input, community partner input, educator expertise input, and design expertise input” all based their analysis of programming needs “on a generic, 15-acre site as presented during Workshop 4.” So it should come as no suprise that programs designed to fill 15 acres won’t fit into a smaller area. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy!
Thus, the rhetoric regarding the Glen Oak School site is that certain things will need to be “cut” or “sacrificed.” But this is misleading. It’s like a kid having a Ford Focus and telling his dad he wants a GT, then when his father offers to help him buy a Mustang instead, he complains about all the “sacrifices” he’d have to make to drop from a GT to a Mustang. Give me a break. The site the city offered is three times the size of the current Glen Oak School and provides more than enough space at a more reasonable cost.
And speaking of cost, that brings us to the second story in the paper today. It turns out that expanding the scope of a project costs more money — something business people know, but apparently caught the school district by surprise.
The board’s original plan (as stated in the Master Facilities Plan) was to replace Glen Oak and White with a K-8 school; that is, it would just be a school building for kids in kindergarten through eighth grade. Somewhere between that plan and their negotiations with the Park District, the new school became a “B-8,” or “birth through eighth-grade community school,” “which means they will provide services for parents, their young children and the community.”
That means the size of the school has increased from 80,000 square feet to 120,000 square feet, which means the cost of such a school building has increased from $15 million to $21 million. The Journal Star then says, ” Where the additional money will come from is unclear.” Ah, yes, the understatement of 2006.
Comically, this all started out as the district’s attempt to save money. Remember? They were going to close these old, inefficient schools and build new, energy-efficient ones which would pay for themselves in the maintenance savings. I wonder how the change in scope from K-8 elementary school to B-8 community school affects their break-even point; that is, I wonder how many years (decades?) it will be before the supposed maintenance and efficiency cost savings exceed the cost of land acquisition and construction. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that will happen on the fifth of never.
So now we have a school district that is horribly in debt that, in an attempt to save money, has figured out a way to put itself in more debt without any visible means of funding their scheme — other than asking the taxpayers to pony up more money, which is not likely to pass.
Moving to the east side of the river looks more appealing all the time.
