Skokie School District 68 has developed a proposal for a one-story building addition to Old Orchard Junior High School and planned to present it to the Skokie Plan Commission on Nov. 7. According to Superintendent Scott Grens, the addition is expected to cost $13.3 million.
According to Grens, the building addition will house the district’s Early Childhood Center, or pre-kindergarten, which will consist of seven classrooms, a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics/Make-it lab, administrative and teacher service spaces and a central student commons area for collaborative learning.
The district has the funds to cover the expense of building the addition, Grens said.
“Due to fiscally responsible decision-making, increases in Equalized Assessed Value (EAV), and support from Corporate Personal Property Taxes (CPPRT), the district has successfully maintained a healthy fund balance, exceeding our total annual expenditures. These savings have positioned Skokie School District 68 to undertake significant capital improvement projects, including the development of the new Early Childhood Center, with funding from our working cash funds,” Grens said in an email.
He also spoke of both local and national interest in pre-kindergarten as an effective way to help children learn.
“Nationally, (pre-kindergarten) has gotten more attention, and we provide a really great program,” Grens said. “People have become more aware of it, and hopefully will take full advantage of it,” he said.
Old Orchard Junior High is District 68’s middle school, teaching grades six through eight in addition to housing the district’s early childhood center. According to the district’s application, creating a building addition will free up five existing classrooms at the junior high.
Grens said student enrollment at the early childhood center has more than doubled since last year. The center has 103 students enrolled this year, compared to 50 students enrolled the year before, he said.
“It’s just an amazing investment in the community. We’ll have several really innovative learning spaces,” Grens said. “Our goal is to provide this service to the community as early as we can, and pre-kindergarten is such an impactful way to do that, so we’re really excited to be able to provide it, and I think it’s just going to help strengthen the district and the community even further.”
Data from the Illinois Report Card, however, shows that enrollment at the junior high for 2024 is 633 students, a downward trend from 2018 when enrollment was 754 students.
Throughout the district, student enrollment is up by 57 students this year from the prior school year. In 2023-24, enrollment stood at 1,637 students and increased to to 1,694 in 2024-25, disrupting a downward trend prevalent since 2018, per state records.
When asked why the early childhood center had such a spike in enrollment, Grens said, “it could just be community interest and more awareness of the importance of early childhood learning.”
“I don’t know if that means people are moving into Skokie or not, but I know that enrollment is up (throughout the district),” Grens said.
With the proposed addition, the school would rearrange traffic flow in the parking lot and pickup and drop-off lanes, per the district’s application to the village.
According to a letter from Grens to the Board of Education on Aug. 15, an outside architectural firm showed the Board a proposal for a building addition to Old Orchard in 2022. The project will go up for bid during the fall and the cost will then be finalized. Construction is anticipated to begin in Spring 2025, according to district documents. Construction is expected to wrap up during the winter of 2025-2026.
