District 124 Approves Summer Maintenance Budget

Board members of the Evergreen Park Elementary School District 124 voted to approve a $170,966.43 budget for district-wide maintenance scheduled to commence this summer.
 
What started as a long-stretched community effort has finally come to a close with a unanimous vote, where the school district officials have agreed to provide all of the funding necessary to complete the repairs for each school campus.
 
Among the many campus projects scheduled to be completed this summer, District 124 plans to replace the furnace at with a more energy efficient model, provide additional air conditioning units in the kindergarten through 6th grade computer labs, repair broken water maines at and restore the roof of .
 
Fran LaBella, District 124 assistant supt. for business services said, “we’re looking at all of the projects that really need to be done.” According to LaBella, “the roof [has been] and ongoing process."
 
Many of the plans for the repairs, LaBella said, would be completed in several weeks, while other lengthier projects may extend well into the year to two year mark.
 
“The roof work had been an ongoing nightmare, that’s been going on for the better part of the year,” said LaBella.
 
Construction is scheduled to start as soon as school breaks for summer. “As soon as students leave, we’ll start work,” said LaBella. Students completed the school year on Monday.
 
“Things like painting take the longest,” so the entire summer is necessary for all of the repairs, said LaBella.
 
In addition to the campus renovation, the district has also proposed a separate $68,659 plan to rework the security systems for District 124. This proposed plan is still in the early stages of development, and administrators’ hopes are to update former security structures with more current ones. The district has proposed a potential partnership with the state, whereby the state would fund half of the money necessary to refurbish each school's security system.
 
Bill Smith, Director of Building Grounds said, “the proposal for the security grant took about three weeks to put together,” and although it is still very much in the preliminary stages, his hopes are that things will be up and running by mid-summer once everything has officially been approved. Approval for the security projects for the state ended June 6.

Patch will update this story as information becomes available.