Belleville school district asking voters to fund $10.6 million building addition

When some Belleville, Shiloh and Swansea voters go to the polls in the primary election, they’ll be asked whether Whiteside School District 115’s Board of Education should issue about $10.6 million in bonds for an addition to the elementary school.

The addition would allow Whiteside Elementary to eliminate aging mobile classrooms that currently house the early childhood and pre-K programs and bring them into the main school building, alleviating concerns related to accessibility, safety from active shooters or intruders and extreme weather, district leaders say.

“These are our smallest of small students,” Superintendent Mark Heuring said. “If we’re able to get them back in our building, in a brick and mortar style building, it’s probably the best for them.”

The trailers for the district’s early childhood special needs program are located near the southeast parking lot of the elementary school, situated in a U-shape with a semi-enclosed artificial turf playground. Trailers located off the west side of the school and a playground behind them serve the morning and afternoon pre-K programs. Others on the campus serve as storage space.

The trailers were purchased in the 1990s, Heuring said, and thanks to the district’s maintenance and custodial crew keeping them up to grade and passing annual inspections, they have continued to serve the elementary school well past their estimated 10-year lifespan.

Looking toward the future, however, the board’s goal is to get the district’s youngest students out of the mobile classrooms and into the elementary school to address the safety concerns and maintenance costs, Heuring said.

The tentative plan for the addition is to build an approximately 15,860-square-foot, L-shaped hallway on the southwest corner of the existing elementary school. The hallway would contain six classrooms, a room for therapy intervention services and additional bathrooms.

A new, 15,000-square-foot playground with soft and hard play surfaces would be added in the empty space created between the L-shaped addition and the southwest side of the existing building.

The project would also aim to improve traffic flow on the south end of the campus along Southwind Drive by adding parking spots to the existing lot on the southeast side accessible from the road, creating a new parking lot on the southwest side that would also be accessible from the road and connecting the two.

Additionally, the board is exploring the possibility of adding a solar array on the roof of the elementary school as part of the referendum to reduce the district’s utility costs and carbon footprint, Heuring said. A similar effort with other funds is already underway at Whiteside Middle School. In doing so, District 115 joins others in the metro-east going solar to save money.

Tax implications

Bonds are a form of debt, similar to loans, that school districts can issue to finance capital improvement projects.

For most types of bonds, a district pays back the principal amount plus interest over a set number of years with local property taxes.

Last May, the school board voted to adopt a resolution allowing the district to issue and sell $4.5 million in general obligation bonds for its working cash fund after holding the required public hearing on the matter.

Those bonds were sold to replace the roof, install a solar array on top of the new roof to combat rising utility costs and upgrade the heating, ventilation and air conditioning system at Whiteside Middle School, Heuring said. The district is also using some COVID-19 federal relief funds for the HVAC project.

Selling the bonds raised property taxes within the district by about $140 per $100,000 of a property’s fair market value every year for the seven-year repayment period, according to Heuring, resulting in a tax rate increase of about 50 cents.

In tax year 2022, Whiteside 115’s tax rate was 2.5184, according to St. Clair County tax records, which was more than a dollar lower than the average of 3.5671 among elementary school districts.

If the district’s bond referendum passes, it would not further increase annual property taxes, Heuring said, but the $140 hike would remain for an additional 13 years, since the referendum-related bonds have a 20-year repayment period.

“What the board did from a forethought standpoint was they structured the working cash bonds so that if this referendum were to pass, there wouldn’t be additional cost. It would just be additional time,” Heuring said.

He said the district “has been a longstanding community partner that has been frugal and tried to make wise decisions with finances over the long course of time,” adding that upkeep of school buildings is an important community investment.

Elementary school building history

Whiteside School District 115 dates back to the 1850s when it began as a log building on an acre of property owned by William Lot Whiteside before it was formally established as a one-room school made of soft brick in 1865, according to a video on the district’s history.

Belleville News-Democrat archives show that the current Whiteside Elementary School building at 2028 Lebanon Ave. opened its doors to students in September 1958 after the Whiteside family sold five acres of land to the school district, which passed a $75,000 bond referendum in November 1957 to construct a new school with three classrooms and a multi-purpose room.

Since then, the building has been added to several times as enrollment grew. That original 1958 portion of the school now serves as the library media center, computer lab and custodial office.

The most recent addition to the elementary school was in 1997 when 22 classrooms were added amid booming growth, according to BND archives. A few years later in 2001, the district broke ground on the middle school at 111 Warrior Way after a successful bond referendum and with the help of a state grant.

In the April 2009 consolidated election, voters rejected a $9.75 million bond issue 712-507 for the district to build and equip a new, 49,000-square-foot building west of the elementary school for its early childhood through first-grade students.

Here is the proposition that will be on the ballot for voters who live within Whiteside School District 115:

“Shall the Board of Education of Whiteside School District Number 115, St. Clair County, Illinois, build and equip a classroom addition to the Whiteside Elementary School Building for early childhood and pre-kindergarten programming, eliminate mobile classrooms and acquire and install a solar array at said School Building and issue bonds of said School District to the amount of $10,608,885 for the purpose of paying the costs thereof?”