GLEN ELLYN, Ill. (CBS) — In a year, a Glen Ellyn school will move into a new building, but that’s more than a strong roof and sturdy walls. Philip J. Rock Center and School will give new opportunities to some unique children.
Executive Director Bonnie Jordan said she starts every day asking “what’s good for the kids,” and she said that’s what the new building will be.
Philip J. Rock Center and School is a school unlike any other in Illinois.
“We are a unicorn,” Jordan said. “We really serve a specific level of students here.”
It is the only publicly funded residential school in the country for students who are deaf-blind. This means that the school’s students have both hearing and visual impairments.
The school is currently housed in a former nursing home from 1961.
“The building wants to die, and I’m keeping it alive,” Jordan said.
The building has heating and air conditioning problems, and because the children live there, the bedrooms are near classrooms and offices.
“I’m most excited for the students to have a separation between a school environment and the residential center,” teacher Allyson Peters said.
Peters knows how difficult it is to help students in the current building.
“In the winter it’s freezing, in the summer it’s extremely hot. It’s hard for our students to have the energy to keep going all day,” she said.
Crews recently began pouring cement for the new building’s foundation. Construction should be completed in about a year.
“It will serve the community in a variety of ways, and it is certainly one of a kind,” said Phil Pimentel, senior project manager for Path Construction, which is building the new school.
The building will have separate dorms, and new features that students don’t have now, because, as Jordan said, this is all about the students.
“Every day we start with what’s right for kids,” Jordan said.
Because children’s services are so specialized, there are currently only nine students at the school, but once they move to the new building, the school could have 20 students.
Jordan said they have also expanded the criteria for who can attend that school.
