After a wide-ranging discussion that spanned months and a few school board meetings, the Riverside Elementary District 96 Board of Education approved a new school fee structure at its Jan. 17 meeting.
Instead of differing registration fees for every grade level, the school board decided to simplify its annual registration fee structure to charge just two fees: $110 for elementary school students and $130 for students attending R. J. Hauser Junior High School.
Parents of most elementary school students, except current fourth graders, will see a slight increase in the annual registration fee while parents of Hauser students will see savings ranging from $50 to $70 depending on the grade.
The school board decided on an approach in which families will pay about half the cost of such items as workbooks, new library books, periodicals, school supplies and textbook replacement. This approach will cost the district about $40,000 to $50,000 more than a revenue-neutral approach to the fee structure, which would not have changed the proportion of the cost of the so called “consumerables” that the district is bearing. That approach would have resulted in a $200 registration fee for Hauser students and $110 for elementary school students.
School board finance committee chairman David Barsotti said that district could easily afford to absorb the additional cost, noting that the district is running a surplus and adding substantially to its reserve funds again this year.
“I don’t think we should be concerned about being revenue neutral,” Barsotti said during the discussion that preceded the Jan. 17 vote.
Board member Stephanie Basanez Gunn agreed.
“We are a district that can bear 50% of the cost,” Gunn said. “I feel really comfortable with a 50% subsidy.”
While the vote to approve the new fees was unanimous, board member Dan Hunt initially favored the revenue-neutral approach, noting that the registration fees for District 96 students are far lower than the fees for students at Riverside Brookfield High School.
$3.5 million bid accepted for Central-Hauser campus
In other action at the Jan. 17 meeting, the school board unanimously accepted an unexpectedly low bid of roughly $3.5 million from Aurora-based Abbey Paving to redo the rear outdoor portion of the Central-Hauser campus. The work, which will begin this summer, will include a new playground, a new grass field and a revamped new parking lot. Abbey’s bid was the lowest of the five. It came in $118,000 lower than the next-lowest bid and about $2 million lower than another competitor.
That prompted some questions from other board members, but finance committee chairman Joel Marhoul and consultant Ramesh Nair said that they were confident that Abbey would do good work.
“This is a very good bid,” said Marhoul, who is a civil engineer. “Don’t go too hard in trying to understand why. There is a lot of churn in the industry right now. Abbey believes they know what they’re doing, and Ramesh and the architect have vetted that they are capable of doing the work and are responsive, so they should give us good quality and there’s no reason to doubt these numbers.”
Nair said that he was worked with Abbey on other projects and that they have done good work. He said bids vary all the time.
“It depends on how hungry they are, that’s why it’s an open market public bid,” Nair said in a telephone interview. “We felt comfortable after we talked to them.”
Nair had previously projected the Central-Hauser project would cost between $4.5 million to $6 million.
The school board also approved a $349,007 bid from Chicago based MBB Enterprises to perform tuckpointing at Ames School this summer.