$75 Million Gym Upgrade Approved By New Trier High School Board

WINNETKA, IL — A capital improvement plan to renovate the east side of New Trier High School's Winnetka campus last week received unanimous approval from the board.

The $75 million plan calls for replacement of the school's 93-year-old Gates Gymnasium with a new main gym with the same distinctive barrel roof. The planned three-story building also includes a six-lane indoor track, expanded workout spaces, 12 new classrooms, climbing wall space and centralized athletics offices.

Superintendent Paul Sally said only 1,100 students attended New Trier when the gym was built. Now, 3,000 students attend the Winnetka campus, with all of them enrolled in kinetic wellness (formerly known as physical education) courses, and many participating in 35 sports.

"We have a space that's really inadequate to meet the needs of those students," Sally said.

Officials described the athletic facilities, especially the indoor track, as cramped and dilapidated. Among its Central Suburban League South athletic rivals, New Trier is the only school lacking a field house.

"We have one of the largest [athletics] programs in one of the smallest spaces, when looking at total participation," he said. "We're way behind our peers, and we are looking forward to rightsizing the space to meet the needs of our students and our community."

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Board member Jean Hahn thanked everyone in the community who shared their perspective on the gym project.

"I was struck, not only by how profoundly our families and our alumni, our students, our faculty value New Trier, but by your universal support expressed for this endeavor," Hahn said.

"In a year that has really been fraught with uncertainty and some contentious decisions that at times threaten to drive a wedge through our community," she said, "tonight feels like a refreshing return to the collegiality and collaboration that more typically characterizes problem-solving in the New Trier community."

Funding for the project comes primarily from the issuance of $50.5 million in alternate-revenue bonds, as well as savings from bond refinancing and cash reserves. Alternate-revenue bonds do not require the approval of voters via referendum.

The estimated annual debt payment for the new bonds is $3.1 million, which is about 2.7 percent of the district's 2020 budget.

Administrators said the district has generated an average annual surplus of $7.3 million over the past five years. Most of that money was spent on equipment and construction and maintenance projects.

In 2014, voters approved a referendum to finance a $100 million campus construction project that upgraded the west side of the Winnetka campus. The work was completed in 2017 with the same architectural firm, Chicago-based Wight & Co., which created a design for the east side that aesthetically aligns both sides of campus.

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Board Vice President Marc Glucksman said the district appeared to be better positioned for the east-side upgrade than it was seven years ago.

"We are also living within our means, we're not asking for a referendum, and financially this probably is the best time to do this," Glucksman said. "We also engaged all of our stakeholders multiple times, and this is a very, very, very refined project."

The COVID-19 pandemic has reduced borrowing costs for those with good credit — New Trier's has the top available credit rating — as well as increased competition among builders.

"It's an optimal time to issue debt, because less of the money goes to interest and more goes to benefit the school for the benefit of our community and our students, and it's an optimum time for bidding," the superintendent said. "It's a good time to be in the market for construction, as companies are hungry for that work."

The district plans to issue 21-year bonds, which is projected to save about $8 million in financing cost, as compared to the original plan of taking 26 years to pay them off. Following a public hearing next month, administrators plan to issue the bonds in April.

A final design is expected by the summer, with bidding opening in November and construction starting in December. Demolition is anticipated to be complete by February 2022, with work on the exterior complete in November 2022 and full completion of the project in August 2023.

The original gym was funded with a $500,000 bond issued in 1922, which also built a new powerhouse to heat the school and its athletic fields, according to the Winnetka Historical Society. It was named after then-school board member Leslie Gates after he died suddenly of a heart attack before its 1928 completion. According to remarks from the gym's dedication ceremony, the total cost of completion at $675,000.

"This building should take care of care of the gymnasium requirements of the school for all time," Board President Jesse Gathercoal said at the time.

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"You know, there's a feeling you get when you walk into the Gates gym," said board member Greg Robitaille. "Kind of a throwback, I get all that. But there just comes a point where the maintenance required, the inefficiency of the space, the fact that it was built at a different time for different size school, different needs of our students, different programming — it's just not salvageable in any reasonable context."

The gym is the last part of campus with steam boilers and no air conditioning, and maintaining the existing structure was projected to cost more than $9 million over the next decade, according to district architects. Many improvements have been delayed more than a quarter century.

Board President Cathy Albrecht said the project had evolved and improved since the selection of an architect in November 2019.

"The time is right, it's the right project, and it's going to finally unite our campus," Albrecht said at the Feb. 16 meeting. "Let's get this done, and gets this campus contiguous and modern and flexible for our students."