In no other part of Lake County is the effect of two decades of spectacular growth more evident than in the Tri-Town Area of Libertyville, Mundelein and Vernon Hills. Most of the people and things in all three towns weren’t there 20 years ago–and that includes the students enrolled in the schools.
Enrollment increases have been sudden in some districts, especially at the leading edge of the growth curve in the early 1980s. Since then, however, districts have learned to manage growth within their boundaries. Most keep track of large tracts of undeveloped land, for example, in an effort to predict how many new homes are likely to be built and how many students will live in them.
Finding money to pay for space to house those new students has been the central issue of dealing with growth, district administrators said. Mobile classrooms have been a common sight in recent years as district decision-makers have sought ways to finance permanent replacements. Most of the mobiles are gone or going.
Easily the most noteworthy of recent construction projects fostered by local growth was the opening in fall 1999 of Vernon Hills High School. Originally designated Libertyville High School South Campus, the $48.5 million edifice for 1,600 was built on the southern fringe of an office park near Milwaukee Avenue and Townline Road in Vernon Hills.
For years, officials at Libertyville High School District 128 had tried to convince voters of the need for a new high school building to serve the southern portion of the district, essentially the village of Vernon Hills.
Constructed long before Vernon Hills was incorporated, Libertyville High School’s two campuses, one for freshmen only, were seriously overcrowded. Lunch periods started before 10 a.m. and ended after 2 p.m. to accommodate all the students, for example.
Voters finally approved a bond issue in 1997, and Vernon Hills High School opened in fall 1999 with 700 students, all freshmen. Sophomores and juniors are scheduled to start at the school this year.
“We have about 2,650 students now and are projecting total enrollment of about 3,200,” said Yasmine Dada, District 128 business manager. “We now have the capacity for that. We’ve always been near the top in terms of academics, but we just got there facilities-wise.”
A stadium and additional athletic fields are in the works for the next two to three years at a former Navy Nike missile site adjacent to the school. The Vernon Hills Park District is also scheduled to develop part of the site.
Mundelein High School District 120, the other high school district serving the Tri-Town Area, is ahead of growth in its boundaries. Additions to Mundelein High School in 1995 and 1996 following a successful referendum measure to issue $12 million in bonds boosted the school’s capacity to 2,300 students.
The school has an enrollment of about 1,800 students, giving the district a comfortable room for growth.
But thousands of acres of undeveloped farmland in unincorporated Fremont Township in the western part of the district could generate as many as 1,200 new students in the next 10 years or so, said Patricia Steele, District 120 director of business and operations.
“We are doing long-range planning right now, and we think we have a good estimate of what’s likely to happen in the future,” Steele said. “We may have to go to a referendum in a few years, but we’re staying on top of growth and it’s not like we’re going to be taken by surprise.”
Fremont Elementary School District 79, which serves the area west of Mundelein High School, doesn’t have the breathing room of the district it feeds into, however. Voters shot down two proposals in March to raise the tax rate for the district education fund and to issue $14 million in bonds to add a new building to the district’s roster of Fremont Elementary School and Fremont Middle School.
The already-crowded district has 1,470 students and is expected to grow to 1,600 by next year, said Daniel Schuler, district business manager. District administrators have dealt with the rejection at the polls by cutting staff and raising average class size to 29 students from 23, Schuler said.
Space is especially tight at the elementary school, which was built in 1998 and serves kindergarten through 3rd grade, Schuler said. The middle school was last expanded in 1993. The district may return to voters in November with a different proposal.
Ideally, the district would like to add buildings around 2003 and 2008 to get a grip on growth for the foreseeable future, Schuler said.
“We’re hoping that this is just a bump in the road,” Schuler said of the failed referendum measure. “This district has done some good things in recent years, and we’re hoping to take our case back to the voters.”
Mundelein Elementary School District 75 is one of the few districts in the area where mobile classrooms are still in use. But not for long, said district Supt. Raymond Partridge.
Over the summer, the district began a construction project to replace mobile classrooms that were in use at all three of its elementary schools: Washington, Lincoln and Mechanics Grove. The cost of financing the $1.9 million bond issue for the project was tacked onto the district’s existing debt to avoid a tax increase, Partridge said.
Growth in the district has slowed in recent years from 7 percent annually to less than 2 percent, putting its current enrollment of 2,235 pupils at its three elementary schools and Sandburg Middle School close to its projected maximum of 2,400 pupils, Partridge said.
“Our tax base is almost entirely residential and we’ve been able to do a good job without going to the people for a tax increase,” Partridge said. “We’re really proud of that.”
Next door in Diamond Lake Elementary School District 76, which serves Mundelein as well as the unincorporated area known as Diamond Lake, administrators are completing plans for a $12 million construction project to expand all three district schools: Fairhaven and Diamond Lake Elementary Schools and West Oak Middle School. Fairhaven and West Oak each have two mobiles in use, all of which will not be needed after the construction.
The project is being financed by an $8 million bond issue approved by voters in March and by a $4 million grant from the state Capital Development Board. In addition to the new classrooms, all three schools will receive new amenities, such as updated computer labs, said district Supt. Roger Prosise.
Groundbreaking for the project is scheduled for spring 2001, with completion planned in time for the start of the 2002-03 school year, Prosise said.
“We have about 1,215 students now, and our demographic study says we’ll hit about 1,400,” Prosise said. “But we have a lot of undeveloped land in the district too. It’s difficult to say what our maximum will be.”
Mundelein resident Tom Rogan has one child in each of District 76’s schools. He praised district administrators for what he called their conservative approach to spending taxpayers’ money and their openness to input from parents. An active parent who worked to pass the March referendum measure, Rogan said he is pleased with the direction of the district.
“Kids are resilient and they’ll acclimate to anything, including mobile classrooms,” Rogan said. “But mobiles are a short-term solution, and the administration had to make some hard choices. They did, and that’s why residents were willing to support them at the ballot box.”
Its location in the middle of Libertyville has spared Libertyville Elementary School District 70 many of the headaches of rapid growth because most of its territory has been built out for decades.
Although bottom-line growth in the district of 2,700 students has been slow, that growth, plus the evolution of age distribution and the need for new programs, has required the district to add onto three of its five schools in the last six years, said district Supt. Mark Friedman.
“We’re moving some classrooms around to accommodate new programs, like turning our traditional shop classes into high-tech classes,” Friedman said. “We’re seeing some increasing enrollment, but nothing like some of our neighbors. We have contingency plans in place, though.”
Hawthorn Elementary School District 73 in Vernon Hills has 3,300 pupils, and growth has slowed to a trickle, most of which comes from a trend toward larger families rather than development in the district, said Robert Loranger, district spokesman.
Hawthorn Junior High School, which cost $11 million, opened in 1999 after voters approved it in 1998. The building houses 800 pupils but was built to handle as many as 1,000 to stay ahead of growth, no matter how slow it may be, Loranger said.
Last year, the district also used the space freed up by the new junior high to reconfigure pupil distribution at its two elementary schools, Hawthorn North and Hawthorn South, which serve 1st through 4th grades. The district also has Hawthorn Kindergarten, Hawthorn Option School and Hawthorn Middle School, which serves 5th and 6th grades.
District 73 parent Cindy Hebda has watched the district’s growth carefully as her daughter has worked her way through the schools. The district was on the state’s watch list of financially threatened schools for part of the 1990s but has finally blossomed, she said.
“I think last year was the big turning point for the district,” Hebda said. “They’ve finally been able to accommodate the growth and, by doing that, they’ve raised the expectation of learning.”
Hebda’s 13-year-old daughter, Stephanie, who will start 8th grade in the fall, said her first year at Hawthorn Junior High School last year was a refreshing change of pace after her years in crowded schools in which classrooms sometimes had to be improvised.
“There’s a lot more space in the new school, and we actually have real walls,” said Stephanie, a cellist in the school’s orchestra. “The music rooms have better acoustics too.”
