Around 30 residents of the Heather Hill neighborhood in Flossmoor attended a meeting on Aug. 17 about safety concerns after one neighbor found a child playing in the detention basin construction site surrounding Heather Hill school.
Crystal Cleggett said her husband first noticed the boy at the site and told her about it. A few moments later, the boy returned and began playing behind the fence again. She felt a need to intervene.
“There’s these three large metal cylinders,” Cleggett said. “Let’s say he had gone up to the fence and stepped on one. Those would have rolled right over him. We can’t lift those, and we probably wouldn’t have been able to see him.”
Cleggett asked the boy why he was playing on the site, and he told her that he was curious because he had seen a piece of heavy equipment with the door open. After warning the boy about the dangers of his actions and sending him home, she called the Flossmoor Police and asked them to investigate and secure the site.
Cleggett said that portions of the fence were bent over, and a child could easily gain access by going around some concrete barricades and entering under the gate. Construction workers were already gone for the day, but a police officer did his best to secure the area after she informed him about the vulnerable areas.
Ashly Giddens, a District 161 PTO member, attorney and mom of two young boys, was an organizer of the meeting at Heather Hill School. She told the crowd she had learned about attractive nuisances in law school and explained what the term meant.
“It’s a construction site, an abandoned building or a junkyard,” Giddens said. “When we were going through those cases, the only kids who would get injured were boys. They love to go to these types of sites because they look fun. They love seeing tractors because they have toy tractors at home.”
Many residents at the meeting voiced their concerns about multiple safety issues at the school. In addition to the site not being secure or monitored, they complained about a lack of crossing guards and traffic control. Safety during crossings was especially concerning for them because of the increased construction traffic and additional obstructions around the school, including a temporary fence that construction crews will soon replace with permanent fencing.
“This is a school of predominantly black and brown students,” Giddens said. “When kids of color attend school next to bars, it does impact them. It kind of creates a school-to-prison pipeline mentality. They feel restricted. It impacts test scores.”
The residents discussed different solutions that could help alleviate problems and create a safer environment. Some recommendations included cameras with motion sensors, having someone on-site to monitor around the clock and a new plan that includes underground water storage instead of an open basin. They also voiced concerns that anyone monitoring the site must walk around the fence to see the bottom and ensure nobody had gone inside.
“No matter what, you’ve increased the probability that some kid will drown,” Gary Dingle, a retired scientist and president of the local chapter of the NAACP, said. “It’s a lot deeper than I expected. That’s a dangerous area over there.”
Mayor Michelle Nelson said that delays pushed work on the project beyond the anticipated completion date of Aug. 12. “There were six rain days,” she said. “Additionally, we took the first two days of school off to let the traffic settle down so everybody could get into a routine. We had some pretty heavy rain last night, so they are working on pumping water out before they can haul away about 100 dump trucks of dirt.”
Nelson said she has worked to address safety at the site. “The fence has been secured in the one area where there was an issue, and there are cameras on the basin,” she said. “There are more drivebys by the police. Additionally, the village sends two staff members to every recess. There is also no construction during drop-off or pickup.” She also mentioned that the school was not allowing students to use the playground next to the site during school hours.
Nelson said they had changed the plan slightly. “It was originally about 30 feet from the playground, but because of parent concerns, we pushed it to 55 feet from the playground,” she said. She believes underground storage at the site would be too expensive because other areas in the village have drainage issues that residents want fixed.
“We should have been coming to the table earlier and often with residents. We missed the mark on that,” Joni Bradley-Scott said. “I live in Heather Hill. Residents contacted me about this plan early in the process, and I was told [by the village manager] that I was jumping ahead on things, the basin wasn’t going here and it was going somewhere else.”
Bradley-Scott is a village trustee running for mayor in the April election. While she didn’t blame the current mayor for most of the issues surrounding the detention basin, she noted that village management has been consistent for many years and believes the lack of transparency and response to resident concerns begins in that office.
Many residents voiced concerns about the detention basin on school property in the planning phase. The District 161 board voted to approve the plan in April. In July, a group of residents sought a temporary restraining order to halt the plan, but work on the detention basin continues.
A status hearing on the temporary restraining order suit was held Aug. 8. Attorney Douglas Cipriano said his client’s motion to dismiss the Homewood-Flossmoor Park District as a defendant was approved by Judge Sophia Hall.
The remaining defendants — the Village of Flossmoor, Flossmoor School District 161 and Pan-Oceanic Engineering — were given until Aug. 15 to file a motion to dismiss the case. The plaintiff, Crystal Cleggett, will have 21 days to respond and Hall will issue a ruling sometime after the defendants respond to Cleggett.