Construction on a major addition to Brook Park School is expected to begin this summer, according to officials at Brookfield-LaGrange Park School District 95, who are inviting residents to a meeting tomorrow night which will address a final draft of the district’s facilities master plan.
The meeting, which will include school board members, the district’s architect and the district’s construction manager, will take place at 7 p.m. on Jan. 25 in the second-floor conference room at S.E. Gross Middle School, 3524 Maple Ave., Brookfield.
District 95 Superintendent Thomas Hurlburt cautioned that the meeting will not include detailed floor plans or elevation drawings for the new addition, nor will it specify improvements to be made at Gross Middle School in 2008. However, the presentation by district officials will be a culmination of the master planning process which began more than a year ago and will begin to set the stage for final design planning later this school year and construction in summer.
“Thursday is the roll out of the master plan, not of the design phase,” Hurlburt said. “These are the possibilities. They’re not set in stone. Thursday we start to narrow the scope of everything.”
Tomorrow’s meeting will serve as a summary of the three public planning meetings held by the district in 2005 and 2006, which identified need areas for the district. Officials at the meeting will also give an overview of life safety issues identified in the 10-year life safety plan completed last fall.
Finally, there will be a discussion about programming-issues that district staff have identified that they’d like to address, for example, enhancing science labs at S.E. Gross Middle School.
The district’s construction manager, Douglas Lim of Gilbane Inc., is expected to present a tentative timeline for the construction of an addition at Brook Park and renovations at S.E. Gross School. The architect is Alan Armbrust of FGM Architects/Planners Inc.
While the plans included in the draft proposal of the master plan are not finalized, it’s clear that the addition to Brook Park will be located on the north side of the building and will include a multi-purpose room that can serve as a school lunch room and accommodate other programs involving larger numbers of students. Whether the building will be one or two stories is not clear, and will depend in part on the financial constraints of the district.
According to a proposed timeline in the master plan draft, construction on Brook Park could begin as early as July, with completion in the summer of 2008. Hurlburt said that the hope is for the multi-purpose room to be available for use by January 2008.
Meanwhile, renovation and life safety improvements at S.E. Gross Middle School may begin during the summer of 2008 and be completed by the beginning of the 2008-09 school year.
The improvements to both schools are being driven by a list of district priorities, which came out of the planning sessions with community members and district staff over the past year. In addition to life safety issues, the priorities identified by the district include, creating a more secure entry at S.E. Gross School, moving fifth grade to Brook Park School, building a lunch room/multipurpose room at Brook Park, expanding technology, science and libraries at both schools, creating an additional language classroom at Gross, upgrading power supply at Gross and installing an elevator at Gross.
Exactly how much all this will cost has not been determined yet, but will certainly require the district to issue construction bonds. Issuing the bonds will not require a referendum and will not result in a property tax increase, according to Hurlburt.
The district currently has just over $2.6 million in bond money available from an earlier bond issue. In addition, the district has the ability to issue another $7.5 million to cover the cost of the new construction in the district. The bonds would be paid off over 20 years.
Hurlburt said the district is willing to issue bonds in that amount for the new construction projects.
“We’re trying to make sure we don’t overdo it or under do it,” Hurlburt said, adding that the district would be guided by “the financial constraints we’re operating under.”
District 95 board member Thomas Powers, who chairs the board’s Buildings and Grounds Committee, said that the meeting tomorrow night is not meant to reopen the master planning process or to gain wish list ideas for the improvements.
“Hopefully [residents] will be satisfied with what they see and will want to see more,” Powers said. In an ideal world, we’d accept the master plan [on Jan. 25].”
The board would likely follow up with additional community meetings once the designs are finished to explain the district’s final decisions regarding the exact scope and timeline for the work to be done at both schools.