North Cook News

Arlington Heights has multiple school projects on the horizon, including a kindergarten expansion project and steps that are being taken should schools ever want to go solar, and the school board heard a status report at its Dec. 13 meeting.

‘We are making our roofs solar ready,” Ryan Schultz, director of facilities management for Arlington Heights Schools, said at the meeting, a video of which is on YouTube. “And all that really means is we're going to have a route for a conduit to go up to the roof and have a kind of an open location on our electrical walls where panels that could be put in the future in the electrical rooms.” 

He said it’s a low-cost first step to prepare the buildings for a potential installation of solar panels on the roof later.

“So we are incorporating that because it's practically no cost at this point to do that,” Schultz said. “All it is is really having a conduit portal up to the roof for a lot of these locations.”

He also discussed the kindergarten expansion, which affects six schools — Dryden, Olive, Westgate, Patton, Greenbrier, and Windsor — in two phases. The first three listed are part of the first phase, while the others are in the second.

The district is working on scheduling and completing all of the community meetings and city council meetings with the village of Arlington to get approval for  the plans. They plan to open bidding for the first phase projects in the spring, with construction following. The aim is to finish phase one construction before the start of the 2024-25 school year.

Greenbrier and Windsor construction is on track to commence work in the spring of 2024, with Patton possibly running alongside their schedule or starting in the fall of 2023 because of the expected extra stormwater work. Most of the schools will be receiving between two and four new classrooms, although Westgate will get 10 new classrooms.