With Kings Point purchase, Belleville 201 follows local need for career, tech training
By this time next year, Belleville Township High School vocational and alternative education students will have a newly-renovated center in the former Kings Point facility in Belleville.
Originally built as a tennis club and fitness facility at 7645 Magna Dr., the Kings Point property has 100,000 square-feet. Over the next year, the tennis courts, yoga studio and tanning rooms will be converted into classrooms and technology labs.
“This is where you have to start having a really strong vision,” Superintendent Brian Mentzer said walking into what will eventually be a commercial-grade kitchen for culinary arts and food preparation during a tour of the property.
The space had been the restaurant kitchen for Kings Point, but for now, it’s dimly lit and mostly in shambles.
The district’s vision for a career and technical education campus started five or six years ago, with Mentzer and the previous superintendent, Jeff Dosier.
“It has taken a long time for us to get to a point where we feel we can bring it to fruition,” Mentzer said.
What are the costs?
Now, years deep into the project, Mentzer’s passion is clear when he talks about how a good job can change someone’s life, and how career and technical education programming can help high school students start on that path.
Part of the long lead-up time was the cost and facility needs of a project like this. The former Kings Point owners sold the property to District 201 for $1.25 million, which Assistant Superintendent Dustin Bilbruck said was below market value because the owners wanted to support the program and the community.
According to county tax information, Kings Point was last sold in 2001 for $2.5 million — twice what District 201 paid for it 20 years later.
Belleville 201 closed on the property this week and is pursuing an aggressive renovation timeline to welcome students in August 2022. Bilbruck said the cost of renovations and the technology and manufacturing equipment necessary for programming will be around $6 million.
Over time, Belleville 201 has been awarded grant money for the project, including covering the cost of buying the property. Mentzer said the district will be revisiting some of those grants to determine how much of the project they’ll cover.
A growing need for tradespeople
Members of the metro-east business community approached the district a few years ago to say they needed the district to do more to help build and maintain a workforce, Mentzer said. While the district’s programs have grown within the high schools, the need was growing too.
“Right now, we’re at a point with our programs where we can’t fulfill the need where we currently sit,” Mentzer said. “We don’t have the space, we don’t have the opportunities, and we don’t have the amount of instructional time in the day to be able to provide what the community market is saying we need more of.”
The foundational classes for freshmen and sophomores interested in CTE programs will stay housed at the high schools. The facility at Kings Point will house programming geared toward juniors and seniors. Mentzer said the hope was that juniors would spend part of their day at their main high school and the other part at the new center, while seniors would spend part of their day at the center and the other part getting hands-on experience through internships, apprenticeships or dual-credit opportunities with partners like Southwestern Illinois College.
“We are in the process and we have been in the process of reworking both our philosophy on the trades and our programmatic outcomes,” Mentzer said. “Really, the programs will stay intact in the buildings. Our goal is to provide our students that are further along in the process a more intentional approach to the trades.”
‘Aggressive’ renovation schedule
The Kings Point property has three floors. On the main floor, the plan is for the Alternative Education Center to be on one side, with about seven classrooms for approximately 100 students. On the other side, there will be a culinary classroom and a university center-like area with library study space, areas for group work and a cafeteria.
Downstairs, where there are now tennis courts and a turf baseball infield, between 15,000 and 20,000 square-feet will be allocated for lab space for welding, machining, metalwork, carpentry, construction and automotive.
The rest of the floor will be a multi-use sports space that could be used for anything from cheerleading to football to volleyball to marching band. As CTE offerings grow, though, that space could be used differently.
“This space is really huge; it’s just kind of dwarfed by the size of the building,” Mentzer said.
Walking around the facility, there’s no mistaking its size.
For now, the top floor will contain more offices, classrooms and student work spaces. In the future, Mentzer said there would potentially be expansions in the district’s business, healthcare and education offerings that would be housed there.
Outside of the physical renovations, there are other things the district needs before the program starts next fall. Mentzer said the district is in the process of building apprenticeship opportunities and will need to hire more personnel, including CTE teachers, to keep the program rigorous for all grade levels.
“We don’t want to neglect what’s in the high school buildings either,” Mentzer said. “Those are the foundational years that help get them here.”
This story was originally published September 28, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
