Along with the chirping of bird spring is expected to bring the roar of construction equipment to Riverside-Brookfield High School this year. Construction is expected to begin in April on RB’s nearly $64 million renovation and addition, project manager Andrew Totten of the James McHugh Construction Company told District 208 school board members at the board’s meeting Jan. 9.
The work will be done in three phases, Totten said. Phase one will begin in April and consist of building a $1.5 vocational education building on the west side of Golf Road next to the RB football stadium. The VocEd building, which will include four bays for work on cars, is expected to be completed by January 2008, Totten said.
Work will also begin this April on the infill of an open courtyard, which will serve as the new music center. This new space will have separate band and choir rehearsal rooms, rooms for instrument and uniform storage, seven individual practice rooms and two musical libraries, one for choral music and one for instrumental music. It is expected to take about a year to complete the music space, Totten said.
Upgrades to second-floor classrooms will also be part of phase one, as will the installation of a new mechanical plant room, which is expected to be completed by November 2007.
The second phase of work is scheduled to begin in October and will involve the construction of a new, expanded swimming pool. The new pool is expected to take approximately one year to complete, Totten said. RB will be without a pool for that year, as the new pool will be built in nearly the same location as the existing pool.
During the year RB will be without a pool, the school hopes the school’s swimming teams will be able to use another pool in the area, perhaps the new pool at Lyons Township High School, Athletic Director Otto Zeman told members of the District 208 Board of Education.
The third phase of the project will be the construction of new academic and administrative space in the northwest corner of the existing building, new second floor classrooms, a new student commons and an athletic field house. This third phase is projected to begin in January 2008. Totten said that he hopes to complete the entire project by September 2009.
“That’s pretty aggressive,” said Totten.
The new school entrance has been significantly redesigned since it was first presented last year. The formerly contemporary style has been abandoned in favor of a style that fits more closely with that of the original high school facade, which faces Ridgewood Road.
The Vocational Education building, which will be tucked into a space northeast of the stadium also refers stylistically to the original school building.
Parking deck nixed
One significant design change in the overall concept is that the renovation of the campus will apparently not include a parking deck on Cook County Forest Preserve District property north of the campus. The parking deck was originally an important part of the design, since the school will lose its faculty parking lot in the northeast corner of the campus, when the new fieldhouse is built.
But, according to Pat Sumrow, who serves as District 208’s owner’s representative for the project, the school is no longer planning to build the parking deck. Part of the reason, she said, is that the cost for elements of the project related to school instruction were higher than anticipated.
The money originally earmarked for the parking deck, as a result, has been redistributed to those aspects of the plan. The district is now planning on surface parking only, which will include a proposal to increase parking along Rockefeller Avenue west of Golf Road.
Final plans for parking solutions, however, are at least four to five months off, Sumrow said.
New cheerleading, baseball coaches
Also the school board unanimously voted to hire an additional freshman baseball coach beginning this year and another cheerleading coach beginning in the fall.
The new baseball coach will give the school two freshmen coaches, and allow for both freshmen A and B baseball teams. The new freshman baseball coach will be paid a stipend of $4,700.
The new coach will give RB a total of five baseball coaches. The new freshman baseball coach is expected to allow another five to 10 students to play freshman baseball and should insure that more players see game action, Zeman said.
The new cheerleading coach will bring the total of paid cheerleading coaches to three. The new cheerleading coach will be paid a $2,600 stipend.
Cheerleading is now an Illinois High School Association-sanctioned sport, and the current cheerleading coaches came before the board a few months ago to request another paid coach. They said the additional coach would help insure safety of cheerleaders, who now practice more dangerous stunts, and allow for more students to participate in cheerleading.
In past years, an unpaid volunteer has been helping coach freshmen baseball and another unpaid volunteer has been helping coach cheerleading.
Bob Uphues contributed to this report.
