The Evanston/Skokie District 65 school board took the biggest step yet in funding Foster School construction Monday night, greenlighting $23.4 million worth of work on the new building, including packages for structural steel, electrical, heating and cooling, plumbing, fire suppression, windows, roofing and more.
That represents the majority of the hard construction costs on the project before including design fees and the build-out once the structure is substantially complete. Before Monday night, the board had only approved about $5.8 million for site clearing, ground improvements and concrete.
All $23.4 million will be paid with money from lease certificates that the district issued back in spring 2022 to pay for the school. According to its November financial report, District 65 has about $41.4 million in its lease certificate fund right now. Any costs remaining on the $48.4 million project once the lease certificate proceeds have dried up will come from the district’s reserve funds, Superintendent Angel Turner has said.
Cordogan, Clark & Associates, the district’s architect and construction manager, could breathe a sigh of relief after seeing the results of this particular bid package. With the board’s support, the firm took a calculated risk to rebid the structural steel for the building after getting unexpectedly expensive offers last time around. That move paid off big time, with the new bid resulting in a price of about $1.8 million, down from the previous low bid of nearly $2.5 million.
Between additional contingencies that Cordogan Clark included and some of the bids coming in under budget, the project’s combined contingency fund in the event of a proverbial rainy day down the road is now $4.9 million. Brian Kronewitter, Cordogan Clark executive vice president, told the board Monday that he was “extremely happy to see the bid results.”
“We are pleased and cautiously optimistic about the nine bid packages that came in favorable and bring us possible contingency funds to address future challenges,” said Kirby Callam, District 65 director of strategic project management.
“There’s a long runway still to travel, as we know. Most of the construction, if not all the construction, still has to happen. We haven’t even laid foundations yet. And it’s important to know that any funds that we have in excess … we are planning to build our contingency committed to this project until the school is complete.”
Crews are hoping to start digging for the foundation in the next week, Kronewitter said, with completion still scheduled for July 13, 2026, before opening the doors to students a little over a month later. The completion of the building itself is set for the end of May, giving Cordogan Clark close to two months to bring in all the furniture and make sure all the mechanical systems are working.
A final plea for a pause
The board voted unanimously to approve the bids for $23.4 million in construction work. Before that vote, during the public comment portion of the meeting, board member Donna Wang Su read out a letter signed by 126 people that Robin Maddox submitted via email, in which the signees asked the board to consider pausing construction.
The board had a conversation about the idea of pausing the school back in October, but ultimately agreed to forge ahead both out of support for bringing a neighborhood school back to the Fifth Ward and because “a pause right now is not going to benefit us in any way financially,” as board member Omar Salem said at the time.
The letter from Maddox and other signatories centered around a memo written by district financial advisor Robert Grossi on Sept. 12, in which Grossi urged the board to consider pausing the project “until the financial condition of the District is stabilized.”
During that October meeting, Kronewitter said delaying a year or two would cost an estimated $6 million in inflation and potential fees added to bids because of contractor concerns about the district’s financial condition following a sudden pause. A total cancellation would require $1 million to rebuild Foster Field as well, he said at the time.
“As we take stock of how best to use our district’s limited resources to [the] greatest effect for students, we think pausing construction on the Foster School allows for it to be part of that conversation,” the letter said. “Proceeding with this $23 million vote tonight locks the district into 17 years of substantial financial commitments with no clear plan to address these additional costs.”
The letter also went on to state that a “modest cost” coming with a pause would be well worth it for the opportunity to give the community a chance to provide its own opinion: “This isn’t an anti-Foster position, but a trust and transparency building exercise that takes stock of the district’s collective needs and wants.”
Board members, though, have repeatedly made it clear that they intend to go forward with the new school because of the commitment they made to the Fifth Ward community, and because they see the project as righting the historic wrong the district committed when it closed the original Foster School almost 60 years ago.
Prior to Monday’s vote, the district hypothetically could have stopped construction and returned the lease certificates for a fee, but it would have saved the $3.2 million in annual payments it owes on them for the next 17 years. Now, having approved spending more than half the certificate money, District 65 is essentially all in on Foster School.
District 65 approves $23.4 million in Foster School construction contracts is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.