As more and more of their students are opting to live on campus, Elmhurst College leaders are making sure their facilities will keep up with the changes.

On March 3, college officials unveiled their 2007 master plan report. The report details significant improvements college leaders would like to make to the campus, including moving the football field and track and the addition of a performing arts center and parking deck.

“It’s about offering a better educational center and two, a tighter campus community,” said Charley Henderson, director of public relations. “It says something about where we are now and where we are going.”

College officials have not presented a timetable for completing the plan. That’s because it’s more of a road map for the future than a to-do list, said Ken Bartels, vice president for college relations.

Elmhurst College’s first campus plan, created in 1924, came to fruition more than 30 years later, when Hammerschmidt Memorial Chapel was built in 1959.

“The 2007 plan has to be viewed in the same way,” Bartels said. “It will take as long as it needs to take. That’s a little vague but the reality is, it’s a blueprint and it will probably take decades just like the first one.”

College leaders will have to find funding along the way as several of the projects will be expensive, he said.

The plan spells out several expansions to existing buildings. Two new academic buildings will occupy the site of the current football field, just south of Alexander Boulevard. A new stadium and track will take the place of the parking lot north of Alexander Boulevard, and a parking deck will be built north of the stadium and just south of the Union Pacific Railroad tracks.

In addition, Alexander will be incorporated more into the campus with landscaping and other beautifications, Henderson said.

One of the phases of the campus plan is already under way. Recently, the school embarked on a $24 million project to add more housing and parking at the southwest end of the campus. A new 125-space parking lot already has replaced a softball field behind Stranger Hall. By fall of 2008, a new dormitory west of Hammerschmidt will house about 125 more students, Henderson said.

The project is in response to a growing number of students preferring to live on campus. Although 60 percent of the school’s population still commutes to class, that number has dropped about 10 percent in the last decade and may continue to drop.
Elmhurst College enrolled 3,100 students this year, which means roughly 1,240 of them live on campus.

The master plan also reinforces college leaders’ desire to use sustainable design techniques. Regarding the new dorm and parking lot, Elmhurst College is using underground detention ponds, cisterns and water gardens, said Jay Womack, director of sustainable design for Wight & Co. in Darien, a firm handling all aspects of the project.

Such a route puts the building in the running for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design status. LEED certification is the U.S. Green Building Council’s method of measuring the sustainability of new construction.

The building would be the region’s first college housing unit to earn LEED certification. The parking lot was built with permeable pavers so that rain water will trickle down through several feet of gravel and back into the soil.

Wight & Co., which is engaged in several other sustainable projects in the area, also plans to use native plants. Unlike turf grass, native plants will improve the soil and extend the lives of oak trees on the campus, which is a registered arboretum, Womack said.