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News
School district has big growth potential : News : Oswego Ledger-Sentinel : Hometown Newspaper for Oswego and Montgomery, IllinoisSchool district has big growth potential
| Demographic study shows enrollment could one day top 48,000
| by Lyle R. Rolfe
| 10/22/2009
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No one knows when it may happen, but they are predicting what the Oswego School District will look like when the district is built out or developed to capacity.
Superintendent Dr. Daniel O'Donnell told school board members last week that he talked to Doug Gallois, executive director of construction services, about future enrollments and the need for a demographic study.
"Doug and I both used demographic studies at previous school districts to project patterns of growth and to show where additional buildings might be needed. He was not aware of any current figures here, so I told him to ask Mike Schoppe (of Schoppe Design Associate, Inc. of Oswego) to make a study for us," O'Donnell said.
Gallois said the study is a document to be used for measuring and trending. He said it is a starting point that needs to be adjusted each year on the basis of what happened during the previous year. This information will help the district determine where and when new buildings will be needed and how they will be paid for, he added.
The district encompasses a 68 square mile area of northeastern Kendall and northwestern Will counties, and a small portion of southwestern Kane County. The district's boundaries also extend into six different area municipalities.
So Schoppe presented his school funding and growth study to school board members last week. He also has made similar studies for the Plainfield and Yorkville school districts.
Schoppe said the study predicts the total number of students at build out, how many buildings will be needed, where they should be built to serve students, and what the equalized assessed valuation (EAV) of property in the district will need to be to pay for the buildings.
He showed that Oswego takes up 54.4 percent of the land in the district; Plainfield takes up 18.2 percent; Joliet 10.6 percent; Montgomery 8.9 percent; Aurora 7.6 percent; and Yorkville 0.3 percent.
Schoppe showed how they divided the district into ten planning areas and made them correspond to the planning areas Oswego, Plainfield and Joliet have included in their comprehensive plans. He said this will allow the district to work with the communities in planning for new schools.
He said they talked to the communities about future plans and learned Oswego plans to develop its remaining land with a density of one to three residential units per acre. Plainfield officials are planning for 1 to 2.2 units per acre.
He noted that the Oswego's densities will get lower the further south you go from the center of the community. And Plainfield's lower densities will be applied as it grows west from the center of that community.
Joliet's comprehensive plan calls for a density of three units per acre.
"This will be about double what Oswego and Plainfield are planning for," he added.
Only one-third of school
district land developed
He showed on a map that only about one-third of the district has been developed, meaning two-thirds is still to be built out. Almost all of the developed areas are north of Wolf's Crossing Road with a few subdivisions south of here and in the Plainfield area.
"This creates some interesting scenarios when trying to predict what some of these numbers will be.
"Looking at the district today, we have 25,239 existing residential units of all types ranging from single-family to multi-family," Schoppe said.
He is predicting another 52,038 units to be built for a total of 72,277 when the district is built out to capacity. These figures were obtained by using the density figures provided by each community for the ten planning areas, Schoppe said.
He said 0.63 is the average number of students coming from each dwelling unit in the district today, so they used this average to come up with the number of students that will be added to the district at build out.
He said they took the 15,798 students in the district (minus the 391 pre-kindergarten students in the Brokaw Early Learning Center), and divided it by the current 25,239 existing residential units and came up with 0.63 students per home.
"By multiplying the 0.63 by the projected 52,038 future units, we came up with a total enrollment of 48,685 if the communities in the district develop as they are planning," he said.
The district now has 8,530 elementary students, which will grow to 25,803.
The present 3,522 junior high students will increase to 10,711 and the 4,124 high school students will become 12,171 at build out, he said. He said 53 percent of the present students are in elementary schools, 22 percent in junior highs and 25 percent in high schools.
Based on these figures, the district's 14 elementary schools will need to be increased to 31; the five junior highs will need to increase to eight and two or three more high schools will be needed to bring the total to four or five, he noted.
Schoppe said these figures were reached by planning for 832-906 students per elementary school, 1,230-1,480 students per junior high, and 2,400-3,000 students per high school.
Board member Mike Scaramuzzi asked if the 0.63 number would be accurate in the future, considering most of the new homes to be built will be occupied by parents with younger children.
Schoppe said it is a good number for now because none of the communities in the district have figures to show how many children live in each type of dwelling unit-single family, multiple family, townhouse, apartment, etc. He said they would be able to make more accurate predictions if these numbers were available.
"My fear is that the number will go up. This year we had a five percent increase in students (711), and a zero increase in new homes," Scaramuzzi said.
Schoppe said the 0.63 number will probably go up in the future and added that it is about one-third percent lower than Plainfield and Yorkville figures.
O'Donnell said the district's transportation department has a new computer software program that can help them get more accurate numbers on the numbers of children living in various types of housing.
Schoppe said deciding where to build new schools will be determined by the housing densities set by each community. Acquiring sites for elementary and junior high schools will be taken care of through the development process and land-cash donations, he said.
But the district will have to purchase land for high schools, he added.
If the district decides to have five high schools, two would serve areas directly south of the present two schools and the fifth would serve the remaining southerly portion of the district.
If they go with four buildings, the present two would cover the top one-third of the district, the third one would serve the center of the district and the fourth would serve the remaining area to the south.
Hypothetical cost
estimates also in study
Schoppe worked with Gallois in preparing hypothetical cost estimates to the point of build out.
For 17 elementary schools, they estimate the cost at $12,750,000 per building for a total cost of $216,750,000. Three new junior highs at $28,000,000 each would total $$84,000,000; and 3 high schools at $105,000,000 each, would cost $315,000,000.
Schoppe said these figures were based on the cost of the most recently built schools in the district with possible inflationary increases added.
The total for all new buildings, minus any land cost, is set at $615,750,000.
If they could issue 20 year bonds at 5.24 percent, (the rate of the last building construction bonds sold), it would require a bond sale of $1,355,000,000 he said. This would require annual payments of $67,750,000 over 20 years to retire the bonds.
Schoppe said they would need new tax revenue of $47,750,000 per year to retire the bonds. Figuring that 88 percent of the current district EAV is from residential property in the district, tax revenue from new residential would have to total $42,020.000, he said.
If they applied a tax rate of $1 per $100 of assessed value on new residential in the district, they would need a total EAV of $42,020,000,000 to pay for the bonds, he said.
By dividing the 52,038 new residential units in the district into the $42,020,000,000, they end up with $80,748, which he said would be the EAV of each new residential unit. Their average market value would be $242,244, he said. The average residential EAV is about $211,000 today, he added.
Using the taxable value, ($80,748) and the $1 per hundred tax rate, each home would pay taxes of $807.48 per year to pay off the $42.020 billion needed to retire the bonds.
If the present 88 percent residential number changes because of an increase in non-residential development, which generates tax revenue but not children, it would help the overall financing.
Schoppe reminded board members that all figures are hypothetical based on the best numbers available today.
The study will be reviewed by board members before the next meeting at which time they will be asked to support the study and allow Gallois to meet with officials of communities in the district to request their help and input in keeping the study up-to-date.
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