URBANA – A new early childhood center to be built in Urbana will be connected to adjacent Prairie Elementary School, creating a space that can be used for community functions.

The Urbana school board this week approved a design for the early childhood center that calls for it to be connected to Prairie through a new gym at the elementary school.

The early childhood building will have a family center that will include meeting space. That area and the new Prairie gym will serve as shared or common spaces at times.

"There's a lot of larger spaces, multi-use spaces, that can potentially be offered to the community for more community use," said Riley Glerum, an architect with IGW Architecture of Urbana.

Washington Early Childhood Principal Cris Vowels said she and her staff are thrilled to see the project move forward, after nearly a year of debate about how to provide a new early childhood center.

"It's been a long time coming," Vowels said.

The new building will be accessible to everyone, a major drawback with the current early childhood building at 1102 N. Broadway Ave.

"Right now, not only can some of our students not make the second floor, but some of our parents and grandparents and community members can't access the family center," located in the basement, Vowels said.

The electrical system is outdated, and the building doesn't have enough restrooms.

The new building "will just help us do our jobs more efficiently," Vowels said.

At the last school board meeting, board members said they wanted more specific plans showing a connection between the early childhood center and Prairie school before approving the design. The plans presented then showed a freestanding early childhood building that could be connected at some time to Prairie if the district wanted that.

The slight delay in the design process means the new early childhood building will be ready to move into in December 2012, rather than August 2012.

The plans will provide Prairie school with a new gym sooner than anticipated, though.

The plans were presented to a group of parents at Prairie last week, said Michele Maeder, president of the Prairie PTA. Parents there had some concerns when they heard the school might be connected to the early childhood building, she said.

"Our concern was having to share a gym. We wanted to make sure we still had enough space for PE and recess," Maeder said, noting the school's gym now serves as the cafeteria as well.

When parents saw that the early childhood center would have its own gym and Prairie wouldn't lose PE time, they were satisfied, Maeder said.

"What they presented was what parents were hoping we would get," she said.

The estimated cost for the early childhood center was $12.3 million. Adding a new gym at Prairie and connecting it to the early childhood center makes the total project cost an estimated $15.6 million. The proposal also calls for options – depending on cost – to remodel the existing gym at Prairie into more of a multipurpose room and add fine arts classrooms as part of the project, and whether to build 12 or 16 classrooms initially at the early childhood center.

Architects will continue with design and developing bid documents through the spring and summer. Glerum expects the district will go out for bids in August and begin construction in October.