District 200 Board of Education Approves Site for Swimming Pool

Submitted by Oak Park and River Forest High School District 200.

At its regular monthly meeting April 23, the Oak Park and River Forest High School District 200 Board of Education approved the parking garage next to the high school as the site for constructing a new 50-meter swimming pool.

Currently, per an intergovernmental agreement with the Village of Oak Park, the village owns the garage while the district owns the land on which it is built. The total estimated cost of $37.5 million for the pool project includes $3.5 million for the district to purchase and demolish the garage. A decision about how to finance the project will be made at a later date. Construction is planned to begin in June 2016, with the pool to be completed in time for the 2018-2019 school year.

The new pool structure will not incorporate parking, and the district has been working closely with the Village of Oak Park to develop a plan for replacing the 300 parking spots lost in the demolition of the garage with on-street parking around the high school.

The board’s selection of a pool site was informed by a detailed study conducted last fall by a special board committee. The 17-member committee included District 200 board members, administrators, and faculty, as well as nine community members.

The two swimming pools at the high school were built in 1926, and since then, roughly 80,000 students have taken swimming as a required part of OPRF physical education. The normal lifespan of an indoor competition pool is 40 to 50 years. At nearly 90 years old, both pools have significant maintenance and functionality issues and have exhausted their useful life.

For further information visit www.oprfhs.org > Board of Education > Pool Project.

Below is the option the board voted to approve.

Option 2: Build Pool on Garage Site with Off-Campus Parking Only

Under this option, we would build the pool on the parking garage site and no new parking would be built. We have worked with the Village of Oak Park to develop a plan for increased on-street parking to support this option. The attached memo from Jill Velan, Parking and Mobility Services Director at the Village, identifies the possibility and process for providing on-street parking for up to 300 cars. The following is a summary of the possible parking options:

1. Keeping our contract with Pilgrim.
2. 50 unrestricted on-street parking spaces on the south side of Chicago Avenue could be designated permit parking for staff or a shared student/staff parking area if the student parking area on South Blvd was also shared.
3. 100 time-restricted on-street parking spaces could be designated permit parking for staff on the east-west streets without residential frontage. This option is available under the current Intergovernmental agreement.
4. 150 of the remaining 760 time-restricted and residential daytime permit on-street parking spaces could be shared with D200 staff permit parking. This could be accomplished by sharing approximately 10 spaces per block on the north-south streets throughout the area.
5. Special event parking would most likely move to available unrestricted parking inside and outside the area, or additional shared parking options would need to be considered.