Housing slump for student-built homes
By Denise Linke
For The Beacon-News
Mar 14, 2011 11:32PM
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Visitors walk to enter a home constructed by Batavia High School Building Trades students.
Mary Beth Nolan~For Sun-Times Media
House fails to sell, district hires Realtor
BATAVIA – After being unable to find a buyer itself, the Batavia School District will list its latest student-built house for sale with Kettley Realtors.
The house at 707 Lathem St. on the city’s east side attracted hundreds of visitors to three open houses but brought only two bids by the Feb. 28 deadline, said Assistant Superintendent Kris Monn. Both bids fell short of the unpublished minimum price officials set for the house, Monn added.
This is the third Building Trades class house in a row that the district has failed to sell by auction.
Homes built by students in the program sold quickly at a net profit to the district until the housing market collapsed in 2008, said Building Trades teacher Tony Malay.
“We got a lot of compliments on the house from people who toured it,” he said. “It’s just not a good time for anyone to sell a house.”
The house will be listed for $287,000, which includes a 5 percent commission to the real estate firm.
“A house built with the exact plans and similar materials to this one sold for $409,000 in 2006, so that’s a bargain,” Malay said.
“It’s a wonderful house. The students did a great job,” said Monn.
To visit the house or for more information, contact Kettley agent Mary Brauer at 630-879-5555.
— Denise Linke
BATAVIA — The Arts and Crafts-style house sits on a long, narrow lot on a quiet east side street. While the woodwork is dark mahogany and the moldings evoke Frank Lloyd Wright, the modern, open kitchen and remote-controlled gas log fireplace in the family room testify that the house is brand new.
Nothing, however, gives away the fact that it was built by Batavia High School students instead of seasoned professionals — except for the presence of Building Trades teacher Tony Malay and a crowd of parents admiring their children’s handiwork at a recent open house. And nothing indicates that the three bedroom, two-and-a-half bath, two-story with full basement could be the high school’s last student-built house.
“As president of the Batavia Education Association, I know what the (School District) budget is like, and I understand that this would be an attractive program to cut,” Malay said. “But this program has been very valuable to the district and to the community the last 12 years. It’s a great opportunity for students to learn what goes into building and repairing a house, even if they don’t go on to work in construction. And, overall, we’re still showing a profit despite the losses over the past few years.”
While most area high schools still offer industrial arts classes, building trades programs are getting few and far between. The St. Charles and Oswego school districts both suspended their programs last year, while the Kaneland School District hasn’t offered one in years, said Kaneland Superintendent Jeff Schuler.
East Aurora High School still has a building trades program, but students are concentrating on home rehabs, rather than building new houses, because the housing market is so bad, said Clayton Muhammad, spokesman for the East Aurora district.
At West Aurora High School, the building trades program has been working on projects for the School District itself. Stephen Freitag, industrial technology teacher, said having students build sheds and other structures for the school is cheaper than buying prefabricated structures.
In past years, West’s building trades students have been involved in projects for the Aurora Historical Society and Rebuilding Together Aurora.
Lack of interest, future jobs
The Fox Valley Career Center at Kaneland offers classes in residential wiring, Schuler said — but Malay noted that the FVCC hasn’t run a house-building program since 1999.
“We dropped the program last year because at the time we had two homes (built by students) that had not sold. Since then, one house has been sold, but at a loss to the district,” said Oswego schools communications director Kristine Liptrot. “We just couldn’t justify keeping it going, especially since we didn’t have the class sizes to support it.”
“We have discussed bringing it back in some form, but the class size minimums we adopted because of our state financing issues would require us to have at least 20 students at a time in the program, and I don’t know if we could teach that many students safely in that type of class,” noted Carla Johnson, Oswego’s executive director of teaching and learning. “I hope the state fixes its funding of local schools so we can bring it back the way it was.”
Lack of interested students also prompted St. Charles to cut its building trades class, said Superintendent Don Schlomann.
“There are no longer jobs available in that market, so students had less interest in the program,” he said. “The program also is expensive to run. It takes a full-time teacher, plus paying for a lot, materials and some professional services.” such as plumbers, electricians and HVAC workers, who do advanced work themselves and supervise students who do easier tasks.
“At one time, we were able to sell the houses at or above our cost, but the last several years we were selling them for $40,000 less than we put into them,” Schlomann said.
Interest in the class is still running strong in Batavia, Malay said.
“Only about a third of the students in the class are going into building trades as a career,” he observed. “One-third are college-bound, and one-third just want to take a class that gets them off campus. Those students are the most valuable because we can catch them and get them interested in something before they fall through the cracks.”
Now that this latest house is finished, the Batavia students are building storage cabinets and a concessions booth for the new fieldhouse. When the weather warms up, they will start building decks and garages for district employees, who will pay for materials while the students provide free labor.
Learning home repairs
Residents Don and Sally Read said they hope the program survives the Batavia School Board’s $2.5 million budget-cutting process for the 2011-2012 school year. Their son, Ben, who worked on this year’s Building Trades house, is their third child to go through the program.
“None of our sons is going into the home construction business,” said Don Read, adding that one adult son is working with him in the family tire business and another is in college, while Ben will start college next year. “But this is a good hands-on experience for them. It gives them good exposure to the industry.”
“Even though they aren’t going into home building, taking this course will let them repair their own houses when they have houses,” Sally Read added.
Neighbors of the house at 707 Lathem St. said they’ve enjoyed watching students working on it.
“We had to come here and see it because it was so interesting watching it being built,” said Don Mix as he walked to the open house with his children, 8-year-old Rudy and 5-year-old Sasha. “After seeing the kids working on it, I think they probably learned a whole lot.”
While Batavia Superintendent Jack Barshinger said he agrees that students do learn a lot in the building trades program, he would neither confirm nor deny rumors that the program is on the chopping block.
“We have not decided on any cuts yet,” he said. “It might make sense to cut building trades because of the upfront costs and because the houses haven’t sold well since the real estate market collapsed, but that decision is up to the Board of Education.”
“If this program gets cut, it will be a missed opportunity for the kids in Batavia,” Don Read said. “I hope they find a way to save it.”