Kudos to Dist. 203, for getting job done

Faced with the prospect of an unfinished Naperville Central High School this fall and 3,000 students to educate, we think Naperville Unit District 203 showed initiative and creativity by going directly to the unions and making an agreement to keep work going so that NCHS opens as scheduled on August 25. With over 300 construction projects stalled, District 203 was the first to make an agreement leading the way for other districts to follow.

The agreement's sole obligation for District 203, requiring them to use contractors who employ union labor for the next seven years, does not seem to us to be much of a burden considering that, overwhelmingly, most commercial contractors are union shops already and, by Illinois state law, all publicly funded projects must pay the prevailing wage, i.e. the trades' collective bargaining agreement rate.

That said, there is still a cost to the district and its taxpayers. In order to open as scheduled, workers will be paid some overtime to make up for the five days that were lost. Running as large a first-shift crew as possible and hiring a cost specialist to review and negotiate all overtime charges will help mitigate the additional cost. Still, the strike will still have a financial impact to the district and we want the specialist to use a very sharp pencil.

As board member Terry Fielden stated a number of times, the first responsibility of this district is to ensure that its students have a safe facility to attend this fall. We appreciate the district's commitment, its extraordinary effort to deal with and ameliorate the effects of the strike while also keeping an eye on the bottom line. Special recognition goes to Fielden, who with 26 years experience in school construction management, has been invaluable during the reconstruction project, and to Superintendent Mark Mitrovich who led the effort.

Thom Higgins

Peter Shulman

Naperville, QE203.org