Jennifer Davis has a great article on yesterday’s Heart of Peoria Commission meeting. She even quotes me:

Commissioner C.J. Summers noted, “The Heart of Peoria plan says our schools are perfectly located where they are now.”

Another key concern of the commission is the fear that District 150 has not fully examined whether the current school, built in 1889, can be renovated and expanded.

“By their own admission, they haven’t done a study to see if the building can be reused,” Summers said.

Just to clarify and back up those assertions, I wanted to point out that on page II.5 of the Heart of Peoria Plan, it says this (emphasis mine):

The school buildings sprinkled throughout the study area were one of the first features noted by the charrette team. The buildings are not only beautiful, but well located from the standpoint of maintaining the neighborhood structure of the city. This makes the city’s schools even more important as components of Peoria’s neighborhoods.

And on page V.15, it reiterates this point:

Finding: Peoria has maintained an architectural legacy of attractive brick school buildings, well located in its inner city neighborhoods.

So it’s indisputable that Duany Plater-Zyberk — the consultants who wrote the HOP plan — felt that Peoria’s school buildings were well-located, and that their location was an asset in our older neighborhoods.

Why is this important? Because not too long ago, the school board took out of context a book co-written by Duany (“The New Civic Art,” 2003) in which he states that “edge-schools” (those built on the edge of a neighborhood) are a good idea. Of course, the context of that recommendation was completely different than Peoria’s context. There, Duany was saying that a school placed on the edge of adjacent neighborhoods would be the best place for the school to serve both neighborhoods.

In Peoria’s case, the most compelling argument for keeping the school at the current Glen Oak School site is this picture, which was also printed in the Journal Star article (click on the picture to view the very large JPG image):

The red boundary is the attendance area; the blue dot is the current Glen Oak School site; the yellow dot is the approximate location of the proposed replacement school for the Woodruff attendance area on the edge of Glen Oak Park. The circles around each site represent 1/4-mile and 1/2-mile radii from each location. As you can see, the current Glen Oak School site is perfectly centered in the neighborhood, allowing easy accessibility and walkability for the entire attendance area. The proposed site would make it within better walking distance of the animals at the zoo, but longer commute times for the children; in fact, it would lead to increased busing or other motor transportation.

As for my other comment that they “haven’t done a study to see if the building can be reused,” I’m referring to Ken Hinton’s admission in the 9/25/06 Journal Star “Word on the Street” column where they reported, “according to Hinton himself, the district only did a preliminary review of whether the school could cost-effectively be renovated. ‘Glen Oak had a preliminary one, but not a final one,’ Hinton said Friday.”

Once the Commission’s position paper is finalized and submitted to the City, I’ll post a copy of it here for everyone to read.

UPDATE: Here it is (1.45 MB PDF file).

One thing I didn’t mention in my previous post about last night’s school board meeting was the sudden use of New Urbanist rhetoric when talking about the Glen Oak Park site for a new school. One school board member suggested narrowing Prospect and putting diagonal parking in front of the new school to improve safety and reduce the need for such a large parking lot, which is not a bad idea in a “when-life-gives-you-lemons-make-lemonade” sort of way. Another board member went so far as to say that Andres Duany himself recommends putting schools on the periphery of a neighborhood. Duany is the author of the Heart of Peoria Plan, which (if the board would read the plan) actually advocates renovating the current school buildings.

In one sense, it’s encouraging that the Heart of Peoria Plan is on the district’s radar now. But on the other hand, they seem to be trying to co-opt it for their own purposes. Instead of a plain reading, they’re trying to manipulate the plan to fit their preconceived idea of where the school should be sited. When the plan clearly contradicts their ideas, they look to the larger body of New Urbanist writings to look for justification for their plan.