Vacant for nearly three years, Forest Park’s Grant White Elementary School will soon have a new tenant.
At its Dec. 19 meeting, the School District 200 Board of Education approved a lease agreement with Forest Park School District 91, which owns the school that is located at 147 Circle Ave. In July, D200’s growing off-campus CITE program for students with special needs will move into Grant White.
“The ability for us to provide more opportunities for the students and grow our program is really exciting,” said Andrea Neuman, executive director of special education for D200.
D200 will pay an annual lease of $117,691 to rent part of Grant White. The lease agreement runs through June 2028 and can then be extended in one-year increments. Over the 2024-2025 school year, CITE is paying $83,150 to rent space at the River Forest Community Center.
CITE will take up over 19,000 square feet of space on Grant White’s first floor, about 14,000 square feet more than what they use at the River Forest Community Center. Grant White also allows more parking for vehicles that serve program participants.
Community Integration Transition Education, or CITE, is a program for adults ages 18-to-22 years old with disabilities. The program offers Individualized Education Program services, therapeutic support and vocational training to about 55 students.
The CITE program also consists of four teachers and 13 paraprofessionals who help them, plus a vocational coordinator, social worker, speech-language pathologist and physical and occupational therapists.
Moving into Grant White gives CITE more space, since the program has been growing since the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2021, Gov. JB Pritzker signed a law that allows students with special needs to receive transition planning and attend school through the school year that they turn 22, rather than aging out the day they turn 22. This has increased the number of these students who access transition services during and after high school.
“The number of students needing post-secondary education has grown,” Neuman said.
Around 20 years ago when it started, CITE was hosted in an apartment. It has always been an off-campus program, separate from high school.
“That’s actually the ideal because we are essentially preparing students for adult services,” Neuman said. “We have a wide range of kids with varying different goals for transition, and so it ends up being a better set-up for what the reality is post-secondary.”
Getting ready for Grant White
Forest Park School District 91 closed Grant White at the end of its 2021-2022 school year because of low enrollment. Since D91 decided to lease out the school last February, several organizations have thrown their hat in the ring for a chance to use the vacant space.
The Park District of Forest Park and the West Suburban Special Recreation Association asked for space at Grant White to host programming for the park district and people with physical and mental disabilities.
When Dominican University announced it was closing the Rose K Goedert Center for Early Childhood Education in 2023, the Goedert Center wanted to move its preschoolers to Grant White.
Mayor Rory Hoskins even pitched moving children and youth programming at the Howard Mohr Community Center to Grant White. Last summer, the community center hosted its summer camp at the school, as it has in past years.
While deciding who to lease the building to long-term, Grant White has been used for board meetings, after-school and summer programs, adult education classes, and as a parking lot for D91 school buses.
Last May, D200 asked to be considered to move into Grant White. Then at a D200 meeting last August, its board approved a two-year lease with the River Forest Community Center, which expires at the end of June 2026.
The pivot in location was a matter of when space was open to house CITE and planning for the future of the program, according to Neuman.
“Our program is really growing, and so when Grant White became available, we thought it was a good opportunity to be able to have a space that we could grow into,” she said.
So, in November, D200 submitted a proposal to D91 to lease out part of Grant White. A lease agreement was approved the following month.
As for why D200’s CITE program was chosen over any other community organization, “many advantages come from a community partnership with a neighboring district,” according to the agenda from the D200 board meeting in December. “Being members of the same Regional Office of Education, permitting processes will be in alignment. Further, site-improvements may be mutually beneficial and allow for cost sharing measures when appropriate.”
“We think partnering with other educational institutions in the area is exciting,” Neuman said.
For the 2025-2026 school year, CITE will be held at both the River Forest Community Center and Grant White. Programming will fully move to Grant white for the 2026-2027 school year.
D200 and CITE don’t need to prepare much before transitioning over to Grant White later this year. CITE just has to develop its transition plan for its participants and staff.
Neuman said Grant White “is already an educational space, which is one of the great parts about it.”