Kaneland administration outlines high school facility master plan

Kaneland School Board President Teresa Witt was disappointed and felt misled after hearing Wold’s John Mauer and Alyssa Menolascino’s presentation on a Kaneland High School master facility plan during the May 24 board meeting.

“When we first undertook this project to get the master plan done we approved the expenditure for the plan itself and we talked about having it so just when we did things we wouldn’t preclude doing something else later,” she said. “I’m quite taken aback at this timeline because this is not what the board talked about. We didn’t talk about going to referendum in 2022.”

The aggressive timeline includes presenting the finalized master plan for adoption on June 28.

“I just feel like this is way too aggressive,” she said. “And although things are needed and I fully supported the plan, I don’t know that I support going to referendum at this time, especially so close after a pandemic and all of the things we’ve gone though, so I feel misled.”

Mauer explained that the presentation shouldn’t be mischaracterized as a recommendation.

“I think what this timeline does is shows you how aggressive that would be to try to follow that,” he said. “That’s really the first opportunity and you can see even how compressed in the community engagement becomes, and staff engagement, so this is really intended to illustrate the point more than anything.”

In December 2019, the Board of Education directed administration to work with the district’s architects to conduct a master facility plan study for the high school due to the poor condition of the school’s track and that money set aside for potential repairs would not be spent unnecessarily. Furthermore, it was deemed that many more updates are needed at the high school, which warranted representation in this plan.

“I was kind of the one that pushed for this plan because I want to build a field house and never made a secret of that,” said board secretary, Ryan Kerry. “But as we got deeper into this project, most of Kaneland High School is the same as it was when I came to visit in 1992 as a Sycamore High School student so there’s a lot of infrastructure and other issues that need to modernized in my opinion in the high school which all this got rolled into one ball of wax because we don’t have enough money in our budget to do any of the bigger projects.”

Witt said she’d like to see the essential items separated from the dream items on the plan and would prefer a phased approach where the dream items come later.

“In 10 or 20 years are they going to still have high school football? Because there’s some discussion that’s going to go away because of health concerns and things like that, so do you want to spend a ton of money to get a fancy stadium,” she questioned. “I don’t know, I’m just bringing that up, but I think I’d like to see the essential items: updating classrooms, making campus safe, you know, fixing leaks and all that kind of stuff. I’m not against going to referendum if we have to for certain things, but I kind of think we need a field house like we need a hole in the head.”

Recently elected board member Addam Gonzalez also would like to see money prioritized with the biggest needs.

“I would like to take the approach of looking at it perhaps in different phases or maybe prioritizing where the money can be spent best where the needs are the most and then going forward from there,” Gonzalez said. “The way I took it, this is a master plan; this is how the whole campus is going to be revitalized and when I look at the cost, I don’t want to say excessive, but it’s large.”

But who decides what’s needed most?

“Teachers, Mr, (Patrick) Raleigh, Dr. (Sarah) Mumm, they know what our kids need,” board member Jennifer Simmons said. “As parents we think we know what they need, but they’re out there seeing other schools and stuff like that so to me those are the stakeholders, but we need the community’s money so how do we engage both? It concerns me. We want to ask the community what they want.”

Board member Aaron Lawler agreed with the need for input from those in the community.

“For me to even move forward on any of this I would love to see community participation in these discussions and maybe not just one survey but multiple surveys and focus groups and those kind of things just to make sure we’re getting a pulse on what people are willing to do and what they want,” he said. “And just to reiterate that, we have asked a lot of people over the last year and half just like they’ve asked a lot of us, and I think we have to be really sensitive to that as we move forward.”

Fuchs said administration would provide more updates in June.

“So what I can take away from this (discussion) is that we want some essential items separated from some dream items, so some prioritization,” she said. “How they’re interconnected, what some of our communication methods will be to engage stakeholders when it’s time and then start to prioritize and get a process that doesn’t necessarily have that aggressive of a timeline. That’s what I’m hearing from the board.”