‘Belief in the limitless potential of our kids’: Boys and Girls Club turning old school into Impact Center
For more than five decades, the sounds of children learning filled a school on Navajo Drive in Carpentersville.
And after an absence of 15 years, those sounds are going to return when the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Northwest Suburbs opens its Woodland Impact Center next year.
On Thursday, the club held a ceremonial wall-smashing where leaders took small sledgehammers to demolish a piece of drywall. Leaders also updated community members about the organization’s plans to help middle school and high school students.
“This space will once again be filled with the sounds of young people learning, laughing and growing,” Barrington Unit School District 220 Superintendent Craig Winkelman told the crowd.
“Our new impact center represents our belief in the limitless potential of our kids,” said Susan Harkin, president of the club’s board of directors.
A current Boys and Girls Club member, 17-year-old Eliana Rodriguez of Carpentersville, said her 10 years of participating in the club helped her “find her fiery voice for advocacy,” with its programming encouraging children to think, learn and change.
“The club has helped my daughter tremendously,” her mother, Ariana Rodriguez, said.
The former Woodland Early Learning Center — which opened as Hickory Hill School in the late 1950s, then became Hickory Hill Junior High School, and then Woodland — will serve up to 550 youths from Algonquin-based Community Unit District 300 and Barrington 220.
There will be an industrial laboratory, where youths can learn skills such as woodworking, painting and three-dimensional printing; a technology lab for learning coding and computer literacy; a culinary laboratory, where they will learn life and work skills, including certification in food safety; a gymnasium; and a community resource center offering counseling.
The 40,000-square-foot building has been empty since 2010. The Dundee Township Park District bought it in 2023, and the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Northwest Suburbs bought it in 2024.
The club began gutting the building in January, including removing materials containing asbestos and mold. Now comes the construction of offices, laboratories, a commercial kitchen and more.
The club plans to open the center in August.
The whole project, including the purchase, is expected to cost about $13.5 million.
The renovation is funded in part by a $2 million federal grant. The club is seeking $5.3 million to finish it out. Thursday’s ceremony was the start of a “refreshed” capital campaign, Harkin said.