Neither Harry Potter nor the Backstreet Boys were blips on the pop culture scene 20 years ago when Owen Wavrinek first took a spot on the board of Indian Prairie School District 204.
Although books, music, fashion and even the slang children use has changed over recent decades, one issue facing many school districts in DuPage and Kane Counties has been constant: how to house burgeoning student populations.
Residential building was at a relative standstill when Wavrinek ventured into school board politics, but District 204, which covers part of Naperville and Aurora, still saw growth.
“The smallest enrollment increase we’ve had [in 20 years] was 3 percent. That was in the early 1980s, when we were in the middle of a recession and there was [virtually] no construction,” said Wavrinek of Naperville.
Today, the school district has an enrollment of 22,897 and is building a $19 million middle school and an $8 million elementary school.
“I believe we’re the fastest-growing school district in the state,” said Doug Gallois, District 204’s assistant superintendent of business. “We’ve grown by 2,000 students for each of the last three or four years.”
In February, voters endorsed spending $88 million for two additional middle schools and a ninth elementary school.
“It’s just fantastic. We’re so pleased,” Wavrinek said, adding that building needs may not be over. “We expect that in 2005 or 2006, we may have to come back for another referendum for [building] another elementary school and a middle school and for technological and maintenance needs.”
Such growth isn’t unusual in the region, particularly in the Fox River Valley, where subdivisions seem to sprout like wildflowers.
According to U.S. Census figures, the number of children ages 5 to 17 in 1990 in DuPage County was 142,372. By 1999, that number had grown to 165,346–a 16 percent increase.
In Kane County, the number of school-age children was 66,665 in 1990, compared with 88,434 in 1999 — or almost a 33 percent increase.
The need for new schools can be linked to the growth in jobs, said Marc Thomas, a senior planner for the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission.
“To a large extent, it’s fueled by employment growth that has been concentrated in DuPage and northwest Cook County,” he said. “It has become convenient to live in the Fox River Valley.”
Officials from the regional education offices in DuPage and Kane Counties have grown used to coping with growth.
“People are moving west, and soon Kane County will look like DuPage County. I don’t see it slowing down,” said Clem Mejia, regional superintendent for the Kane County Regional Office of Education.
“Construction is steady or increasing. A lot of districts are doing construction,” said Al Medwick, assistant regional superintendent for the DuPage County Regional Office of Education.
A list of all of the proposed, recently completed or in-progress construction projects in school districts in DuPage and Kane would be lengthy. Among them are:
– School District 93, which opened Cloverdale, an $8.6 million elementary school in Carol Stream, in September.
– Downers Grove Community High School District 99, which is in the middle of a $49.5 million renovation project at Downers Grove North and South High Schools.
– Winfield District 34, which is considering renovating a middle school at a cost of no more than $8 million for use as a building to house kindergarten through 8th grade. The district also would close an elementary school dating to the turn of the last century.
– Bloomingdale District 13, which is building two additions totaling 33,000 square feet to Westfield School; the expanded building will become a middle school. Vacated classrooms in two elementary schools will be used for band rooms, special education and reading classes, activity rooms and general classrooms as needed.
– Wheaton-Warrenville District 200, which finished renovating three elementary schools in August and is renovating and building additions to four other elementary schools. It also is building an elementary school and expanding and renovating a middle school. The cost for the nine projects is $52 million.
– Batavia School District 101, which is building two elementary schools and expanding others at a cost of $26.2 million.
– Lisle District 202, which is constructing an addition and renovating Lisle High School at a cost of $12 million.
– Elmhurst School District 205, which is doing an $88 million renovation and construction at York Community High School.
Although demographics dictate a need for a building boom, the surge also reflects a desire to provide up-to-date facilities and space for new trends in teaching.
For instance, in Winfield District 34, which has 450 students in two schools, growth is not an issue, according to Supt. Jack Barshinger.
“Our enrollment is flat,” he said. “But a section of one of our school buildings dates from 1882 and there have been six additions to it.”
The district is proposing to close an elementary school that dates from 1874, renovate a middle school and incorporate kindergarten through Grade 8 in it.
Adapting older facilities for learning challenges in 2001 and beyond is a challenge that Winfield and many other districts face. Technology is vastly different from the era when a blackboard was a primary teaching tool.
“We have classrooms with one electrical outlet,” Barshinger said. “How do you retrofit those buildings to handle computers?”
The size of elementary classrooms in District 34 is about 750 square feet each. Today’s school environment, according to Barshinger, calls for rooms that are up to 1,200 square feet. More space is needed, he said, “because today’s students don’t sit in rows and they don’t learn in isolation. There’s a lot of group learning and a large amount of resource material.”
Dealing with growth, Wavrinek said, has “far and away been the story of our district.” He estimated that about 60 percent of the district’s current enrollment has been in the district less than five years.
The upside to growth, according to Wavrinek, is that it can be attributed, at least in part, to the good job that the district is doing in educating children.
“Parents hear, `If you move to Naperville, get into District 204,'” he said.
