Sycamore District 427 Life School needs new home after Opportunity House expansion

SYCAMORE – Next school year, Life School, a Sycamore Community School District 427 offering services for young adults with disabilities transitioning to independence, will no longer be hosted at Opportunity House, district officials said.

Since 2008 Opportunity House has shared space at its 527 North California St. facility with Life School. Both organizations have a mission to help individuals with developmental disabilities to thrive at home, work and their community.

“This is a sad tale. We are going to lose our space here at Opportunity House. ... They are expanding,” Life School Director Rhonda Graves said at Tuesday’s District 427 board meeting.

Tom Matya, executive director of Opportunity House, said he told the Sycamore school district in fall 2022 that Opportunity House was seeking to expand its day services. To keep all of its clients together, it needed to use the space utilized by Life School, he said.

“I felt we had a very positive experience with the school district, both over the past 15 years and in the discussions about our need to expand,” Matya said. “And they were very understanding. I don’t think there was any controversy on it on our part. We weren’t trying to force them out. We did offer them alternative space, and they made the decision to go a different direction.”

Life School helps an average of 10 students ages 18 and 22 annually through its programming. Opportunity House – a nonprofit that operates 10 group homes in Sycamore and DeKalb – served 221 individuals in 2022, according to its website.

When the partnership between the school district and the nonprofit began in 2008, an individual aging out of the Life School program could transition directly to Opportunity House. Things changed in 2010, however, when the Illinois legislature enacted Prioritized Urgency of Need for Services, a statewide database that acts as a waiting list for individuals who are planning or seeking Developmental Disability Waiver Services through the Illinois.

“And then everyone would wait for the client’s name to be pulled out of a type of lottery system to be placed in day services,” Graves said. “This placed a lot of 22-year-olds at home and on the couch for an indefinite period of time.”

In 2020 the system was changed again. The need for services list still exits, but now organizations like Opportunity House are able to offer private pay for day services, meaning families of adults with disabilities no longer have to wait to be chosen from the list if they have money to pay Opportunity House for services.

“So now Opportunity House is bursting with new clients,” Graves said. “It’s very exciting to see how many new people are in this building everyday. It’s sad for us because they need our space. It’s extraordinary that these adults with disabilities can have access to day services, but like I said, we’re going to lose it.”

Life School doesn’t have to leave Opportunity House’s facility until after the school year finishes, but where the school will operate out of beginning in August isn’t known.

Superintendent Steve Wilder said the school district considered renovating space at Opportunity House’s North California Street location, as well as a district owned warehouse, until the ideas became cost prohibitive.

Matya said Opportunity House made an offer to build a space in the back part of the North California street building but the district went in another direction.

“We’ve had a very good relationship with the school district, Matya said. “There’s been no charge to the school district for 15 years, so I think it’s been a fair deal. And we were actually ... looking at our full mission. We have individuals from the community that want to use our services and we just didn’t have the space to do that. And like I said, we want to have them all in the same area, and that’s why that space became so important to us.”

There are a handful of spaces the district is considering, including one Wilder said he plans to tour Thursday.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, worst case scenario is finding a space temporarily at the high school to provide support for those students, but that’s not ideal,” Wilder said.

Wilder said that setup wasn’t an ideal one because Life School students would have already graduated from a high school, so placing them back into a high school setting wouldn’t jive with Life School’s mission to help its students transition to independence.

If come August Life School does occupy space in Sycamore High School, it would be a temporary solution, Wilder said, but he also had another idea that could transform the program.

“One of the ideas we’ve had, we would have to run this by the Regional Office of Education also, is actually looking for a home, a two-bedroom home,” Wilder said. “The idea is to prepare these students to live independently and to find a small one or two bedroom home. Obviously they wouldn’t live there but those rooms are needed for instruction.”