District 65 needs to have the newly named Foster School in the Fifth Ward completely constructed and furnished by early August 2026 for it to be ready for students that month, and the timeline for that just got a little bit narrower.
“We’re currently in the process of getting Bid Group 1 permitting complete with the City of Evanston. We’ve submitted a construction management plan, and we were recently informed we’ll need a demolition permit and a couple other odds and ends for fencing, et cetera. We’re working through those right now,” said Michael Perez, the project’s lead architect from Cordogan, Clark & Associates, to school board members at a meeting Monday night.
“We’ve built some slack into this construction schedule for these types of little setbacks, but we feel we’re right on target still with the 7/26 [July 2026] building completion.”
At this point, Perez said his team is aiming to have all necessary permits for ground improvements and site excavation by Aug. 19. The permitting hiccups delayed the start of construction by about three weeks.
When the school board approved the K-5, $48.4 million school back in January, project leaders presented a timeline showing a “substantial completion” date of April 21, 2026. In March, they adjusted that end date to June 11, 2026. Now, it’s July 2026.
Back in June, Kirby Callam – the district’s director of strategic project management and one of the administrators overseeing construction – said he was aiming to start site clearing, ground improvements and demolition at Foster Field by July 20. That will now kick off at least a month later.
“I’m concerned that we’re this far out, and the cushion has evaporated this much, ’cause we haven’t even started building yet,” board member Biz Lindsay-Ryan said. “I would like us to think about if we can put some more cushion in now, knowing we’re going to lose it over time, but if we’re saying July now, that makes me very nervous.”
Ben Nelson, a construction executive with Cordogan Clark, told Lindsay-Ryan that this current timeline is their best estimate of a worst-case scenario, and that there’s some wiggle room over the next two years to move certain parts of construction up or back as needed.
Fencing will start going up around the site perimeter as soon as the city issues the permits.
“We understand the importance of having to be done,” Nelson said. “It’s a little bit later of a starting date than what we were hoping for, but with working with the City of Evanston, we feel that we will have all these little issues wrapped up and be started.”
Timeline tightens to finish 5th Ward school before August 2026 is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.