BBCHS remodel mapped out in schematic design

BRADLEY – The reimagined Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School is starting to take shape – in schematic design form, that is.

Details of the high school’s planned renovations and addition were shared Tuesday during the BBCHS School Board’s operations committee meeting.

The presentation was delayed from last month as BLDD Architects worked to trim the anticipated cost to meet the district’s $70 million budget.

That task still has not been accomplished, however, as estimates are down from around $90 million to currently around $75 million.

The total base project cost is $74,986,851.49.

The district’s plan is to use $62 million from referendum-approved bond sales and $8 million from its reserve funds.

Superintendent Matt Vosberg said the district is sticking to that plan.

The project is still in the planning stages, so adjustments can be made going forward to reduce costs.

“It’s better to start out where we’re at right now, because we’re meeting all of our program needs, and then go through the development of the design to get more accurate numbers. We still have time to scale back the project if we need to,” Vosberg said. “If we scale back the project now, it will be harder to add things back in.”

Some of the final cost will be dependent on design, construction and bidding contingencies, with about $2.8 million assigned to each category.

“Right now, we have flexibility to, if we do pare things down, we are paring down things that could be revisited five or six years from now,” Vosberg noted.

Design features

Damien Schlitt of BLDD Architects reviewed the schematic design for the facilities overhaul set in motion via referendum last November.

Part of the design includes an addition with a field house featuring four basketball courts and a 200-meter track, along with a fitness area, weight room, locker room, coaches offices, and spaces for wrestling, dance and cheer programs.

The school’s other gymnasiums will be repurposed for other departments.

“The funny part is, as large as this [addition] is, it’s essentially like a handful of big spaces that do big things,” Schlitt said.

The new dining commons will also be located in the two-story addition, with about 850 total seats between both floors.

The second floor commons will not only support food service, but it will also be part of the main circulation spine planned to provide a better flow of foot traffic around campus.

“Essentially, [students] could avoid the current 6-foot-wide pinch point in the original building the majority of their day if they would like by utilizing this zone,” he said.

The extra dining space will accomplish one of the four main objectives of the project – to reduce the number of daily lunch periods and free up scheduling possibilities.

The proposed layout allow the number of lunch periods to be cut from six down to two or three.

“There would actually potentially be additional teaching periods available to a day,” Schlitt noted. “It gave us a whole different dynamic of how we were designing classrooms and counting the number of classrooms.”

Bringing students under one roof by eliminating mobile classrooms was another goal that is being accomplished with the remodel or reassignment of learning spaces throughout the building.

The project also seeks to address the whole student and student culture, i.e. improving how the building looks, feels and supports students.

Enhancing program support is the fourth goal, with the plan to provide more conducive learning spaces for every department from English, math and science to fine arts.

“This is the baseline that, as we started our conversation and as Matt would continue to remind us, these are the things we need to solve,” Schlitt said. “Regardless of anything else that we do, we have to solve these pieces.”

Plan progress

Schlitt explained that the team is “essentially at the beginning” of the process of bringing BBCHS’s reimagined building to life.

“It’s a process and we’ve done a lot of work to this point, but we are still kind of in the early innings,” he said.

They are past the pre-design phase, where they met with various groups in the building to gather input on what features are needed.

“Right now, we’re at schematic design, which really is an organization of the building, starting to look at how the mass of the building looks, starting to talk about what the materials are to that, and assigning some budget and dollars towards those issues,” he said.

The full BBCHS Board is scheduled to hear the schematic design presentation during its July 14 meeting and vote on moving ahead to the design and development phase.

This next phase will answer in more detail how the building and its systems will be laid out, Schlitt said.

By the end of that phase, a more detailed cost estimate can be given from PSI Construction, he said.

“We like to say that by the end of design and development, we’ve stopped asking questions. We’ve [gotten to] the point where we know what’s going in the building, which allows us then to enter into construction documents,” Schlitt said.

“So, at that point, we are literally taking all the decisions we made and documenting them in a format to be able to share out to bidders.”

Site plan overview

The overall site plan shows an addition will be attached to the rear of the existing main building toward the center of campus.

There will also be a courtyard in the middle of where the main building and the addition connect.

On the east side of campus is student and event parking and a bus loop and bus drop-off.

On the north side is staff and visitor parking and car loop and car drop-off. The school’s tennis courts will also be relocated on the north end of campus.

The existing stadium and practice field will remain as they are currently situated.

A smaller visitor parking area will be located near the new front main entry on North Street.

Next to the main entry, at the southwest corner of campus, will be the special education drop-off, leading into where that program will be located inside the building.

Schlitt noted that the school would gain an estimated 80 to 100 parking spaces with the proposed layout. The current parking capacity is about 653 spaces.

Interior changes

Schlitt reviewed schematic design documents showing where the school’s various departments and other building features would be situated.

Many of the building departments are being relocated or reconfigured in different areas.

For example, all of the administrative operations will be situated together near the building’s main entry, including the superintendent’s office, principal’s and assistant principals’ offices, and student support services.

This will allow students to access all the services they need in one location while administrators, counselors and others are able to collaborate.

Academic departments across the school are also being organized into hubs, each having their classrooms, faculty support and office spaces located together.

“We’re redesigning the interior of the building so we have all our fine arts in one location, all of our academics in another,” Vosberg said. “Right now, they are all intertwined. It’s pretty disruptive to have a weight room surrounded by 12 classrooms.”

With the planned redesign, the current weight room is slated to become the library media center.

“In a lot of cases, you’ll see classrooms being assigned to spaces that exist,” Schlitt said. “A current classroom that’s a great classroom doesn’t need to be completely reinvented. ... Then we can slide and use dollars where we need them, instead of having to touch every single wall of every single space.”