Many vie to build DeKalb school

DeKALB – About 180 bidders showed up Tuesday to express interest in building a new DeKalb High School.

The five-hour bid-opening process took place in the Hopkins Park Community Center in DeKalb, where about 20 people – some from the school district, some from an architectural firm and others from the construction management company – sat at a long table accepting bid proposals.

The proposals came from eager construction companies vying for the job of building a new DeKalb High School on 80 acres of land located off Dresser Road near Katz Park. The project comes with an $88.5 million price tag and will be funded with part of a $110 million school construction referendum passed in February 2008.

Plans for a new, approximately 400,000-square-foot school building were approved by the DeKalb plan commission in March, but final approval from the city council is still pending. The new building should have room for 2,500 students and is designed to be easily expanded if needed. Current high school enrollment is about 1,600.

Official proposals came in the form of bid packages, said Nick Papanicholas Jr. of Nicholas & Associates. The Mount Prospect-based construction management company has been selected by the DeKalb school district to guide the building process.

There were 33 different bid packages presented, Papanicholas said, which each have anywhere from three to 15 different bids within them. During the next few days, district administrators will be looking closely at the proposals, analyzing price discrepancies, said Andrea Gorla, the district’s assistant superintendent for business and finance.

“If there is a discrepancy between the lowest and the highest proposals for a given part of the project, we have to make sure that no one made a mistake,” she said, adding that the proposals are within the district’s $88.5 million budget. “It went even better than we expected.”