The ongoing construction of Foster School in the Fifth Ward, at the corner of Simpson Street and Ashland Avenue, is about to kick into high gear, District 65 officials told the school board at its meeting Monday night.
This week trucks are scheduled to drop off pre-cast concrete wall panels, which crews will begin installing March 18, according to Kirby Callam, the district’s director of strategic project management.
“Literally, within a couple of weeks, you’ll see an entire building face around the sides because that’s how quickly it goes up,” Callam said. “There’ll be a ton of truck traffic — we’ve notified Councilmember [Bobby] Burns and sent part of the Fifth Ward newsletter as well as our own newsletter, making sure the community knows that Ashland’s going to be a little hard to travel.”
Residents of the neighborhood or who frequently drive to and from the area should expect heavy truck traffic through the end of May, he said. The city has approved a route that calls for trucks to arrive and depart via Ashland Avenue from McCormick Boulevard, as shown by the green and purple arrows in the diagram below.
In other news, crews spent the last week building a “storm trap basin” underneath the playing field, which is immediately north of Fleetwood-Jourdain Community Center (the building itself will be in an “L” shape, with the two wings running along Simpson and Ashland respectively). The basin will collect rainwater and then release it gradually at a controlled rate, which will help mitigate flooding for the entire street, according to Callam.
At Monday’s meeting, the school board also voted to spend $104,000 of the project’s $2 million in contingency funds budgeted for emergency or unforeseen costs in the course of construction. That money is going toward carbon dioxide sensors for the building.
“Taking this alternate would be an appropriate investment to achieve the LEED Level objective as well as enhance the building’s overall air quality for students and staff,” Brian Kronewitter, executive vice president of architect and construction manager Cordogan Clark, wrote in a memo, referring to the district’s goal of achieving a high sustainability standard for the school as measured through the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) system.
Last month, the district hosted a family night for prospective students from the Fifth Ward and the Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies, which is slated to close when the new building opens. The 120 attendees helped pick the phoenix as the school’s mascot and maroon and gold (with an orange accent) as its colors.
According to a schedule presented to the board in January, the district is also interviewing candidates for the Foster School principal position this month, with the goal of making a hire in April who would start July 1. Normally principals are hired in the spring to start the next school year, but in this case, the district wants to have someone in place a year in advance to give them “a year to engage in the planning, the design” of the building, Superintendent Angel Turner said in January.
Truck traffic expected as Foster School construction hits key stretch is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.