Community Unit School District 200 officials wrote the first page of the final chapter in the Hubble Middle School saga this week with the groundbreaking at the Warrenville construction site.
The ceremony comes after more than seven years of planning, as district officials sought to create a state-of-the-art facility to replace the more than 80-year-old building that now houses Hubble.
The task of designing the school went to Oak Brook firm Legat Architects, the same team that planned the recent renovations of District 200 high schools. Patrick Brosnan, president of Legat, said the firm approached the Hubble design with the same mentality as in those projects.
“We don’t come in with a pre-planned or prototypical school,” he said. “You come in and design each space to what the program is today.”
For instance, teachers called for a design that would foster better communication between the teams, the clusters of students and teachers that compose each grade.
With its winding, narrow hallways, the layout of the Hubble building can make interactions outside the classroom difficult, especially for sixth-grade teachers, who are situated at different ends of the building.
In the new school, each team will have a meeting space between classrooms, ideal for teacher meetings. The goal is to give teachers a space to share notes and develop an overarching curriculum, Brosnan said.
“You need to understand all those students more globally,” he said. “We also want the students to feel like they’re not being taught by one teacher at a time.”
While looking at the needs of today’s classroom, architects also had to keep in mind the future of education. Namely, the design needed to address how technology will change the learning environment.
“Not just where will we plug in the computer, but how will technology be used in the schools in the future?” Brosnan said.
Current trends suggest that one day books will be supplanted by electronic devices that draw from a shared network, Brosnan said.
Architects had to consider what would happen to the library if that becomes reality.
“Where would the library be? Once you put all your resources on a network, it can go anywhere,” Brosnan said.
So designers put the library in the middle of the school, the idea being that there will always be a piece of technology so advanced that the school has just one or a few. A central library would allow shared access to that technology.
“We believe there’s always going to be a place for central gathering,” he said. “The library is still very important, but it’s got to be designed with flexibility.”
The construction at Hubble is expected to take a little more than a year, with work finished in time for the 2009-10 school year.
During that time, officials also will look at what to do with the 22 acres of land upon which the current Hubble sits.
Last month, city officials put out a call for applications from planning consultants to oversee development of the parcel, northeast of Main Street and Roosevelt Road.
City officials have said they hope to see some sort of mixed-use residential and commercial property as well as green space on the property.
Last week, City Manager Don Rose laid out the redevelopment process for the City Council.
He said the hired consultant would act as a facilitator in the planning process, bringing together the interests of the city, School District, the Wheaton Park District and the community to find a plan that best serves Wheaton.
The planning process would take up to two years, after which the city would have a redevelopment plan.
