What’s next for New Trier improvements and why its pools may be part of the plan

The roadmap for future investments in two of the township’s most prized community assets will come into focus later this summer.

New Trier High School officials during the School Board’s Monday, Jan. 26 meeting detailed the district’s intention to craft a new long-range facilities plan for its two campuses, with officials mentioning that the school’s pools are in need of upgrades.

Dr. Chris Johnson, deputy superintendent, told the board that officials have engaged the district’s architects to revise New Trier’s “long-term plan through a collaboration process this winter.”

That process, Johnson continued, will conclude with a new plan for the board’s consideration this summer, which it “can use as a roadmap for potential continued investment in (the district’s) campuses.”

The announcement of a new facilities plan comes as the district is currently in the seventh year of its existing plan, which board members adopted in 2019. Since the approval of that plan, New Trier has made “significant strides in improving our facilities for the benefit of our students and to maintain the community’s investment in our campuses,” Johnson noted.

Notable accomplishments under the last plan include the east side academic and athletic project in Winnetka as well as ongoing updates to the campus’s North and Tower buildings.

Current updates at those buildings, per Johnson, will modernize and expand the number of science labs and improve collaboration on office spaces for student services and facility needs

But the crown jewel of the plan was the three-story, $75-million athletic facility that opened in the summer of 2023 — a project that was made public in 2020 and overhauled the indoor athletic spaces and added 14 modern classrooms.

The district, during the previous plan, also opened its transition center in downtown Glencoe and made several updates to Duke Childs Field in Winnetka.

“As the district enters the seventh year of our existing plan, there is much to celebrate but also significant planning to do as we work to align our resources with the needs of our students and prepare our facilities for the changing nature of education,” Johnson told the board during the January meeting.

While previous plans have included improvements at some of the district’s other assets, the primary focus of the new roadmap will be New Trier’s two main campuses, per Johnson.

The district has “invested significantly” in its Northfield campus, which was built in the 1960s, but “needs remain in the future,” Johnson noted.

Continued updating of educational spaces in both the North and Tower buildings at Winnetka to “meet the needs of current and future educational programs” will likely be a focus as well.

Officials said during the meeting that the current goal is to present the plan to the board this summer during its July 13 meeting.

“We are looking forward to what will come through this process,” Johnson said. “We understand that the plan should be realistic. It will not commit us to any specific projects and specific times or funding sources for those projects but rather suggest which projects are of greatest needs to the students of today and tomorrow and will give the board a chance this summer to begin to consider when and how to address these needs.”

Neither board members nor district officials dove deeply into the specifics of potential work, but one topic that did draw brief discussion was the ongoing needs of the pools at each campus.

New Trier notably built one of the first high school pools in the country but as those facilities continue to age, “there are significant needs there that we want to make sure are incorporated in this process,” Johnson said.

During brief comments made at the meeting, however, board member Sally Pofcher referenced the challenges that come with the desire for a new pool at either campus.

Pofcher, who is on the board’s facilities steering sub-committee, noted there’s “pretty much no way to do new pools at either facility without outside funding,” adding that it becomes a “tricky question” because it will require “community permission to fund it.”

Johnson said toward the end of his comments that officials must keep in mind the perils that come with waiting.

“Every year (we) wait to do something, construction becomes more expensive and we graduate another 1,000 students who aren’t able to use these new facilities,” he said.

New Trier last went to referendum in 2014 to fund the 2015-’17 rebuild of the Winnetka campus’s west side, in which three outdated buildings were replaced with a 300,000-square-foot one at a cost of more than $100 million.

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