001[Music] Hello, Lockport Township High School District 205 parents and guardians. My name is Dr. Bob McBride, superintendent of Lockport Township High School District 205, and this is your board meeting brief for a special board meeting we had last night, Thursday, April 3rd, in the porter room. And you might ask yourself, what is a special board meeting? Occasionally, we have to go off of our typical rhythm of a monthly board meeting that we hold the third Monday of every month and have a special board meeting when we have certain items that the board has to address and has to approve in a timely fashion. In this particular case, it's an very important item that I wanted to briefly discuss with you. Over the past month and a half, we have been working really on a board
002resolution that was passed a year ago. This time on May 20th, 2024, after a failed referendum to renovate Blockport Central campus, our board of education set out listening to you through a community survey and through community focus groups to one continue to stabilize our facilities. Two, do it in a very tax thoughtful way. We know your time, your treasure goes into our school and we want to respect your finances to do it involving you and to do it transparently. To that end, on March 17th, our board approved $15 million in life safety bonds. That's for one project over two summers, the summer of 2025 and the summer of 2026. That project will involve eventually a completely new roof for Lockport Central. a complete address of its exterior envelope through tuck pointing and masonry work and
003a new electrical system inside of the building to make sure that that facility is ready for a thousand freshmen a year moving forward. Last night at the special board meeting, we had one final bid package to approve. Prior to last night, we had approved five bid packages involving work on the roof, involving work on electric. The final bid package we had to approve was on that exterior, all the masonary work of that brick and mortar building. You will see scaffolding going up right when school gets out, right on June 2nd, and even before then, we will start preparing the building. Burglan Construction was the successful bidder. And what they'll be doing on the exterior of the building is doing everything to make sure that that brick and masonry building is airtight. There's no water moisture
004coming in that could hurt the structure. They'll be tuck pointing. They'll be replacing lentils. They'll be addressing window frames. And that will take a huge project, lots of scaffolding, a big job, as well as half of the roof being replaced and part of the electrical on the inside of the building. Last night we approved the final bid project bid bid and we'll be moving forward and like I said starting right when school gets out. A few questions that have come to us. Will this interrupt any kind of educational operations at Central? It will not. Our plan is to begin when students leave and to be done before a new freshman class comes back. Will Central be open over the summer? It will not be open over the summer. Replacing half of the roof, working on
005the entire exterior uh envelope, replacing some of the electrical inside of the building will not allow anyone, even just people in offices like our administrators, to be inside of Central. Will this be completed at the end of summer? No. Like I said, it's a two summer project. Half of the roof and half of the electrical will be done this summer, but we'll need the next summer in order to finish that entire project. Finally, the board is financing this through something called life safety bonds that we're preparing to sell and the board has already approved them. We'll sell those life safety bonds, which in essence are a loan uh that we take out in order to finance the work over a 20-year period of time. We can certainly pay that off sooner if we are able
006to. But also, one of the important things with our strategy here is that this new $15 million bond will have no tax impact on you. And we believe that that's very important. Part of this video is informing you because we promise to keep our public informed about the decisions that we're making. An important board meeting last night. Few other things in the board meeting that I would like to highlight. I'd like to highlight our public relations department, particularly our public relations director, Janette Castillo. We've had a great amount of publicity. Vocal Point has been covered by a number of news media sources. We had an excellent story this week that CBS 2 did about the potential impact of loss of federal funds here in Illinois. And much of that is due to the good outreach
007of our public relations department and director Janette Castillo. Thank you so much for listening to this board meeting brief as we continue to do important things in the district. This coming Monday night, we actually have our facility master planning council will meet and we're going to pivot away from central to this building. East, the part of East that I'm standing in on this side. This side of the building is almost as old as the youngest section in Central. And this side on my left is as old as 2017. This building is both old. This building is new. But like all buildings, probably like your house, it needs constant attention to satisfy your needs, our community needs, student needs, teacher needs, and modern needs. So, our facility master planning council will now be turning to build
008a facility master plan for Lockport East so that we can look out into the future and make sure with our facilities we're able to stay ahead of what your students need and future Porters need as well. Thank you so much for listening in. Have a wonderful, wonderful weekend and go Porters.