Park Ridge-Niles D64 Board may spend up to $10 million for addition to middle school
The Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 Board of Education will vote at its Jan. 25 meeting on whether the district will sell $10 million in bonds to finance the construction of an addition to Lincoln Middle School, according to a communications specialist from the district.
District Superintendent Ben Collins said an addition could save the money the district is spending to send some students, such as those on the autism spectrum, to other districts where they can get services they need. The communications specialist, Chris Lilly, said the process so far has been focused on gathering data and construction costs for an addition.
Lilly said the cost of the addition won’t necessarily come in at $10 million, but that would be the maximum the district could borrow in bonds for the project.
At a PTO meeting on Jan. 11, Collins said the district is considering adding emotional support classrooms and classrooms for a structured learning community in the addition, also called an extension, to Lincoln.
District 64 has a structured learning community available at Washington Elementary School. The program is meant to educate students on the autism spectrum, according to Collins. Once students wrap up at Washington, he said, they need to seek a school out of the district because it does not have any structured learning communities at the middle school level.
Collins said the emotional support classrooms would be to educate students who typically need the help of social workers and have a history of trauma.
“That is a growing population among our student body, unfortunately,” said Collins. “But right now, we are sending those students to other locations because we don’t have the support system to make sure we can take of their needs here,” he said.
Collins said the district spends $1.14 million in tuition and $280,000 in transportation fees annually to send students who need a structured learning community or an emotional support classroom to schools out of the district. If Lincoln Middle School had those same resources, the district could save money and offset the construction cost, said Collins.
Collins said the first draft of the plans, which may change, would be on the school’s North Side. He added that the board of education is also considering making the extension two or three stories tall.
Lilly said the Board of Education is looking into making the extension to Lincoln now because students who were in the Structured Learning Community at Washington are almost ready to enter middle school, but the district does not have those resources ready for them at that level.
Lilly said the process of the extension is still in the beginning phase and that the Board of Education will still have to decide if the $10 million in bond sales will go to the building extension or fund other things in the district. According to Lilly, the board is also considering needed improvements to the district’s schools that would cost in the $50 million to $60 million range.
