Our Town, Our Field to Present Alternate Plan for Memorial Field

With both sides in the debate at a seeming deadlock over what should happen next with Memorial Field at Glenbard West’s campus, Our Town, Our Field—a community group opposed to adding stadium style lights to the field—feels they might have a solution to the problem. It means not adding lights and looking back at previous ideas for Memorial Field as a possible solution to both side’s issues.

At a private meeting on March 17 with Glenbard Superintendent Michael Meissen and Chris McClain, assistant superintendent for business services, Our Town, Our Field presented a radically different plan for the future of the field. It’s one they hope District 87 board members will consider after a formal presentation to the school board tonight.

“It’s a rough idea,” said Our Town member Kirk Burger on March 17 prior to the meeting with district officials.

In a statement released over the weekend, Our Town, Our Field outlined a proposal that, “could solve [the district’s] stated desire for on-campus field time for after-school sports at Glenbard West without creating a negative impact on the surrounding community,” the press release read.

The group's plan calls for razing a “small and under-utilized” conference building located at the park, moving the current location of the tennis courts and creating an area for a natural grass field.

Proponents say this will solve the district’s need to meet the current demand of after-school sports at Glenbard West. The district has previously said that by adding lights to Memorial Field, fewer students would need to be bussed to other fields around Glen Ellyn for practices and games, since practices and games could go later in the night if the field was well lit. By adding an extra field, Our Town, Our Field members said more events could happen at once, and playing late enough to require lights would no longer be an issue. The group also said it would solve an issue where the artificial turf field will become too hot to use during the summer.

District officials feel this is a plan that they’ve already considered, long before the move was made to put artificial turf at Memorial Field.

“At the time, it was a pretty costly solution,” McClain said in a phone interview on Friday. Both Meissen and McClain said they felt the chance of the plan working was “unlikely.”

Even with a cost of upwards of $300,000 to install the lights at Memorial Field, Meissen and McClain said this was something district architects already discussed and found it to be cost prohibitive. The school board is counting on the money for the lights to be raised entirely by the community through groups like the Glenbard West Boosters Club.  They said that if they were to use the Our Town plan, the money would likely need to come from the school district.

The group has plans to meet again with district officials in April, where the district said they will try and bring some estimates with them for how much the suggested renovation would cost.

Don Pydo, a representative from Our Town, Our Field, will be proposing the group’s plan at tonight’s Board of Education meeting tonight, beginning at 7 p.m. at the Glenbard South library.