CARPENTERSVILLE –

"Let the bulldozers roll."
That's what D300 Board of Education President Joe Stevens said Monday after the board cleared the way for the demolition of the old deLacey Family Education Center building at 1470 Kings Road.

Work to demolish the facility on the Dundee-Crown High School campus was scheduled to begin Tuesday and will continue for two weeks. That demolition will cost Community Unit School District 300 about $993,000, and an estimated $560,000 will be spent to restore the site once that work is completed.

"We had been using it for storage, but it was becoming an eyesore, right on the front of the campus," D300 Director of Operations Mike Prombo said. "It doesn't look nice when you drive in."

The school board directed staff to knock down the building that once housed the deLacey Center and the former Kings Road Elementary School in August after approving its demolition in May. At this week's school board meeting, the board signed off on a contract with architectural firm PSA-Dewberry|Burnidge Cassell Associates and an amendment to the construction contract with Lamp Incorporated, both of Elgin.

"It was the wish of the board the last few years," Prombo said.

The deLacey Center now is located at 50 Cleveland Ave., also in Carpentersville, near Carpentersville Middle School.

The center serves preschool-aged children 3 to 5 years old who have special needs, exhibit a mild delay in two or more areas of development or would be considered "at risk." Its special education and at-risk programs are available to children from across D300 who qualify to attend.

"We decided we could make a preschool building as best we could," Prombo said.
The former deLacey Center building has been used for storage since the center moved to its new building in 2006.

It wasn't needed as a school building since the construction of the new center, according to Prombo. It would be hard to retrofit the building, built in 1959, for anything else. And, D300 spokeswoman Allison Strupeck said, "In its current form, it had become a hangout for 'ne'er-do-wells.'"

Already, asbestos has been removed from the old deLacey building and a fence put up around the property, Prombo said.

Upgrades to the site of the former building will include additional parking spaces and two practice fields for Dundee-Crown, a storage shed for athletic equipment and extended sidewalks. Work on the parking lot will be done by spring 2010, and the new fields will be usable by spring 2011.