The Arcola School District Board of Education recently approved a bid to renovate the high school gym locker rooms for a price tag of $850,000. When adding in architectural fees and other incidentals, the project will end up costing around $1,000,000. The current locker rooms were built in the mid 1950’s and have had very little upgrades since installation. With over 70 years of use, the district has certainly been able to take advantage of the original investment. The new investment will be a lot but when spreading that cost out over the years the space will be used, the price tag doesn’t seem quite as high.
The project will include taking everything out of the locker rooms including ceiling, flooring, plumbing/fixtures, lockers, showers, offices, etc. The space will be redesigned with new storage space, office space, a smaller shower area, and all new lockers. The design will remain the same as the current in regards to having four total locker rooms with two being on each side of the gym. One will be a slightly larger locker room space and will be used as the athletic locker room and the other will be a smaller locker room used primarily for physical education. You can see the current design by clicking on this link: Locker Room Design
At the same meeting, the school board also sold $1,000,000 in debt certificates to pay for the project. Using a creative approach, the district is actually borrowing $1,000,000 from its’ reserve fund balances and will be making an annual payment back to itself. The annual payment will come from revenue generated from the countywide facilities use sales tax received by the district. There will be an annual payment of around $133,000 for ten years. Over the last couple of years, the district has been earning over $700,000 in annual revenue from the county wide sales tax proceeds. Those funds can only be used for capital improvement projects. This approach allows the district to improve the locker rooms now and pay the project off over ten years with funds dedicated to capital improvement projects. The $133,000 is also a relatively small portion of the $700,000 meaning there will be funds available to complete other projects. By using the district’s own fund balances to provide the loan, the district will not be paying an outside entity any interest costs.
This is another example of the district’s commitment to providing quality facilities for Arcola students!!!!!