One day last winter during a snowstorm, 9-year-old Phillip Olsen slipped into his bulky nylon snow pants, pulled a knit cap over his head and mittens onto his hands, and buttoned his down coat.
Clad in winter boots, Phillip clomped from his mobile classroom, marched 30 yards through a driving wind and walked through the back door of his school. There, he navigated the serpentine hallways to the front of the building–all in an effort to go to the bathroom.
“When I finally got there, I didn’t have to go anymore,” said the 4th grader at The Lane Elementary School.
Some 50 pupils at The Lane spend nearly 80 percent of their class day in 900-square-foot trailers. The four makeshift classrooms outside the main building do not have bathrooms. In addition to the personal inconveniences, teachers say, pupils traipsing in and out of the trailers (they go in pairs) disrupt class time.
But officials in Hinsdale Elementary School District 181 hope to alleviate Phillip’s discomfort. They are asking voters to approve a $6.3 million referendum measure that would pay for adding classrooms and other amenities at The Lane, which is the smallest school in the district but has the fastest-growing enrollment.
“We’re to the point where we really have no choices,” lamented Sharon Huffman, principal of The Lane. “We’ve converted every available space into classrooms. We’ve added the mobile classrooms and we keep getting more and more students. And there’s no end in sight.”
If the measure passes next week, a homeowner with a house assessed at $100,000 would be projected to pay an additional $60 a year in taxes for 15 years. The referendum is the seventh voters have faced in five years. Most recently, they approved $12.8 million in 1997 for construction of a new middle school.
The Lane, which was built in 1957, has seen its enrollment swell 72 percent during the last seven years, and district officials expect it to grow by another 20 percent through 2005. It eventually will boast the second-largest enrollment of any school in district, they predict.
Already, tiny spaces, once used as storage closets, now serve as classrooms. One-on-one tutoring sessions take place at desks backed into a corner against a door. Hallways overflow with books and file cabinets. Stacks of books and magazines spill out of a library bursting at the seams. The gym doubles as the cafeteria.
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And the school’s 4th graders are taught in makeshift, portable classrooms.
“Sometimes we feel very disconnected out here,” said Camille Skordilis, a 4th-grade teacher. “Sometimes we feel like we are not really part of the school.”
Phillip said he misses wandering the halls with other pupils. “I see the same people all day long,” he said.
The $6.3 million bond issue would pay for a $3.8 million addition, including six classrooms, a multipurpose room, additional bathrooms, an expanded art room and more storage space. An additional $2.5 million would go toward renovations, such as upgrading the heating system, replacing old windows and enclosing open classrooms.
“There’s a certain urgency here,” said school board President Ann Mueller. “From the 1970s on, this district has invested a lot of money in the human resources area–that is, hiring great teachers. It wasn’t until recently that we began looking at space needs, and we have some dramatic and obvious space issues at The Lane.”
Still, district officials and proponents of the bond issue acknowledge that persuading voters to support a building proposal that includes a tax increase will not be easy. District officials have several obstacles to overcome, not the least of which are mounting problems with their latest construction endeavor–building a new middle school.
Clarendon Hills Middle School, slated to open in the fall, has been plagued with controversy since the construction idea germinated, including a legal challenge from residents, bickering with the Park District over a land swap and, most recently, significant cost overruns.
Voters approved a $12.8 million construction bond package in 1997. Since then, however, the cost has risen to more than $15 million. School board members blame the excesses on unplanned construction costs and charges accrued while the district negotiated with the Park District.
The fact that the bond issue doesn’t have districtwide appeal–it would benefit only one school–also makes it more difficult to sell to voters.
But Mueller, Huffman and Dan Rizzardini, chairman of the citizens referendum committee, say they have received support from parent groups in all district schools and have not seen any organized opposition.
Still, Rizzardini gives the package a 50-50 chance of passing. He said his committee polled about 4,500 district residents and more than 75 percent said they support it. Only 3 percent said they would vote against it.
“Anyone who sees those numbers would say, `Wow, that’s tremendous,’ ” Rizzardini said. “But there are 17,000 possible voters in the district, and we didn’t reach even half of them. There are a lot of people out there we haven’t talked to, and we are nervous about that.”