What’s That Building? Forrestal Elementary School in North Chicago
When your elementary school is named Forrestal, it makes sense the building looks like a forest, with tall trees whose limbs you walk beneath to get inside, more trees holding up the ceiling of the lunch room and deer, dragonflies and hummingbirds on the walls.
That’s the experience about 400 kids will have in the fall when the new Forrestal Elementary School opens in North Chicago, 38 miles north of the Loop. The new school’s grand opening was May 1, and the building will fill up with kids and teachers in August.
Outside, the brick building starts with a lot of brick at the bottom near the earth and gets lighter as it goes up toward the sky. The walls are punctuated with big, brightly colored window frames, most of them yellow to suggest the black-eyed susan flower on Illinois prairies, said Cara Kranz, Forrestal’s principal.
Pass beneath the giant orange limbs of a tree at the main entrance, and pretty soon you reach the library, with a big circular reading area designed to look like a ring around a campfire, with the light fixtures above suggesting smoke rings rising into the sky.
Every hallway ends at a big wall of glass with views over surrounding houses and trees. Every classroom has tall windows too, with a reading nook inset into one of those yellow, orange or green window frames seen from outside.
In the gym, the forest theme gives way to big blue waves on the walls, a suggestion not only of Lake Michigan a little over a mile east but also of Great Lakes Naval Training Center, also just east of the school.
About 1 in 4 of Forrestal’s students are from families attached to Great Lakes, the U.S. Navy’s largest installation and where all Navy recruits attend boot camp.
That’s the impetus behind construction of this handsome new school building. Part of the federal Public Schools on Military Installations effort to upgrade out-of-date local public schools that children of U.S. military personnel attend, the new Forrestal will replace the next-door building it has been in since 1957. The school, operated by North Chicago School District 187, sits on federally owned land and is surrounded by a neighborhood of housing for naval base personnel.
At the old building, set to close and be demolished, “we can’t drink the water because there’s lead in the pipes,” Kranz said. “There’s limited air conditioning because the electrical system can’t handle the load, and we only have three adult restrooms for 65 staff members.”
When the federal government looked into the quality of more than 160 U.S. public schools serving military children, “this was the 71st worst in the country,” said John Price, superintendent of North Chicago School District 187.
Of the $72.1 million cost of the new Forrestal, the U.S. Department of Defense is contributing 80%, or about $57 million, Price said. One of the goals of rebuilding schools is to minimize the transitions military kids experience as they get moved around the country. At Forrestal, the addition of grades 4 and 5 to what has been a K-3 school will mean less moving around while a family is stationed in North Chicago.
The 98th worst is also part of the North Chicago district, a school building on the Great Lakes base, and the design of its replacement is getting started, Price said.
Like the new Forrestal, the new Nimitz will be the work of the Chicago office of Perkins Eastman.
Although it’s a New York-based firm, Perkins Eastman has roots in Chicago. Founder Bradford Perkins’ father and grandfather were Lawrence Perkins and Dwight Perkins, influential Chicago architects of the 19th and 20th centuries.
“We think school design should be joyful and playful,” said Josh Bergman, the Perkins Eastman associate principal who led the firm’s work on the new Forrestal. Fairytales and other stories for children, Bergman said, “often start by going into the forest,” and so does the story of this school.
Officially, the school is named for James Forrestal, who in the 1940s was first U.S. Secretary of the Navy and then U.S. Secretary of Defense, but it’s hard to turn that connection into a story kids can relate to.
And besides, Bergman said, parents and other community members on the committee to plan the new Forrestal rejected ideas to make the school look like a naval ship or make other military references. The idea, he and Kranz said, is the school kids get enough military references from their parents.
“This should be their own place,” Bergman said. “Their own story.”
Dennis Rodkin is the residential real estate reporter for Crain’s Chicago Business and In the Loop’s “What’s That Building?” contributor.
K’Von Jackson is the freelance photojournalist for In the Loop’s “What’s That Building?” Follow him @true_chicago.
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