Daily Archives: March 30, 2006

Peoria Park District, Peoria Public Schools, Uncategorized

If you live close to a park or school, beware

1 Comment

I got to thinking about the park and school districts’ plan to site a school at the corner of Frye and Prospect. Their justification for this is that they need 15 acres to build a new school, and thus the current campuses aren’t large enough. They also see an intergovernmental agreement as a major boost for civic cooperation, and the Journal Star has already patted them on the back for it.

Now, if you recall the long-range plan for the school district, they want to tear down 11 schools and build five new ones. This proposed school at Frye and Prospect is only the first one of five. So my question is this:

Where are the other four schools going to be sited?

Since all the schools to be replaced are in the older part of town where there’s very little greenspace left, and since intergovernmental agreements are seen as such a positive thing, I don’t think it’s any stretch of the imagination that the other four schools will be sited exactly the same way.

Thus, if your property abuts a park in the older part of town — you might want to make some contingency plans now. You may pick up the paper one morning and discover your house is the next to go.

Peoria Park District, Peoria Public Schools

State does not require 15 acres to build new schools

3 Comments

I listened to WMBD radio’s morning show today and they interviewed Ken Hinton on the school & park districts’ school-building plan. I don’t have a transcript of the interview, so I can’t swear to what exactly he said, but I came away from the interview believing the State of Illinois requires new schools be built on 15 acres of land.

Not that I don’t believe Mr. Hinton, but I was just curious where that statute was written, so I started doing some checking. I looked on the state’s website, at the Illinois School Code, and at building grant requirements. Nowhere could I find any reference to a minimum site requirement of 15 acres.

So I called the school district offices and spoke with Mr. Guy Cahill (Mr. Hinton was unavailable). He said that he hadn’t heard the interview, but that if Mr. Hinton said 15 acres was “required,” then he misspoke. The Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) recommends new K-8 schools be built on at least 15 acres (and new high schools on at least 50 acres), but there is no minimum requirement.

Mr. Cahill also referred me to the ISBE for more information on the reasoning behind their recommendations. I’m still waiting for a call back.

By the way, I’m in agreement with Bill Dennis of the Peoria Pundit on why this land-grab building plan is a bad idea. One item I would add to his list is that the problem with the school district is not its buildings. They make it sound like people will flock into Peoria to send their kids to a new school building or that student achievement will magically improve simply by virtue of building a new, “modern” structure.

And I couldn’t help but notice that the Journal Star already had an editorial written praising this plan on the very day details of the plan were disclosed to the public. Considering the Journal Star has never seen a park district proposal it didn’t like, I think they’ve become the park district’s de facto marketing department. They clearly knew about the park district’s plans ahead of time (or else that was the hastiest endorsement I’ve ever seen), yet I’ve seen no reports on it in the paper. Why not?