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Trustees raise safety, egress and drop-off concerns as Ashford Academy proposes 146-child daycare at 565 Lakeview Parkway
Summary
Ashford Academy presented a concept for a 146-child licensed childcare center in a multi-tenant office building; trustees and tenants raised concerns about playground placement, emergency egress, parking and safe drop-off/pick-up circulation and asked the applicants to pursue technical review before formal zoning actions.
Applicants Amandeep Singh and Manjot Gera presented a concept for Ashford Academy, a DCFS-licensed childcare operator proposing a 146-child facility at 565 Lakeview Parkway. The applicants described a plan combining two suites into roughly 12,000 square feet, proposed hours of 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., and an outdoor play area of about 2,700 square feet adjacent to the building.
Staff cautioned that daycares in multi-tenant office buildings often present design challenges—particularly meeting plumbing-fixture requirements, keeping secure internal circulation, and providing direct, secure access to an outdoor play area. Trustees and nearby tenants expressed specific safety concerns about the proposed playground location, which sits along the edge of the building near a vehicular curve. Trustee comments repeatedly centered on emergency egress distance and the risk of children having to pass through longer interior paths to reach exits in some emergency scenarios.
Applicants said the interior layout would provide separate infant, toddler and preschool classrooms with a controlled access vestibule and multiple emergency exits, and they described an approach to playground surfacing, fencing, and bollards to protect the play area from vehicle movements. A building consultant said the design team would consider removing landscaping, flattening and combining contiguous pavement surfaces and adding bollards to create a larger, safer play surface contiguous with the building.
Trustees asked the applicants to proceed to a limited technical review rather than assume final approval: staff said the Committee of the Whole’s feedback would guide a subsequent engineering and code review, a formal public hearing at Planning & Zoning and then a recommendation back to the village board. Trustees generally expressed cautious openness to continued review but emphasized that safe egress, pick-up/drop-off circulation and tenant compatibility must be verified before any permit or zoning change is approved.
The Committee did not vote on entitlements; staff advised that the applicants next pursue technical review and that planning and zoning would conduct a public hearing that will give co-tenants and nearby businesses an opportunity to comment.
