PTO at Hough Street Elementary in Barrington ready to pay 50% of flooring project
Barrington Area Unit District 220 officials say a school's Parent Teacher Organization is committed to making a hefty donation to help pay for a proposed building improvement project.
Hough Street Elementary School's PTO would donate $60,000 or so - representing roughly half the expected final price - toward the flooring project. District 220 would pay the other 50% for the Barrington school's new interior surface.
In part, vinyl tile would replace classroom carpeting, District 220 Superintendent Brian Harris said. School board members, with most planning to participate via videoconference, will vote on the proposal at a meeting Tuesday night.
Harris said the carpeting and other interior surfaces are nearing the end of useful life, and replacing it was already on the district's "radar."
The PTO asked the district to consider moving the project to the top of the list this summer, and it offered to contribute 50% of the cost, he said.
"And we thought, 'All right, let's do this.' That type of contribution is pretty significant," Harris said.
District 220 Director of Facilities Nichole Satera wrote in a memo that the Hough Street Elementary project would cover common areas, corridors, resource and support rooms, classrooms and the library.
Addison-based Consolidated Flooring of Chicago submitted a revised proposal to District 220 showing the work could cost $121,449. Hough Street Elementary Principal Jim Aalfs said the privately funded PTO is committed to the project even if it exceeds Consolidated Flooring's estimate.
"With the contingencies, if something were to change, they have the means to increase that to whatever it needs to be. So that's 50%," Aalfs said.
Harris said summer building projects are rotated among the district's schools. One task has been replacing any carpeting with flooring.
"Twenty, 25 years ago, carpet was kind of the thing," he said. "But it's not something that we are doing all at once. We just can't. There's not enough funds to do that, so we're kind of taking one school at a time."