Come next school year, the two buildings that once held Francis Scott Key Elementary students will house the Field School’s kindergarten through eighth graders. It marks the first time the two-building campus at 535 N. Parkside Ave. in Austin will be fully occupied since Chicago Public Schools closed the school, along with 49 others, in 2013.
The private Field School started classes for kindergarten and first graders out of Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park in 2017, but it was always their intention to be based out of Austin.
“When the school started, the vision was to have it on the West Side,” said Jeremy Mann, head of school, who lives two blocks away. The Field School had plans to move into an Austin church, but then the church experienced a change in leadership and school leaders realized the site required expensive changes to make the building up-to-code for children.
“The whole idea is to make a home-school advantage available for kids on the West Side,” Mann said. While the Field School is non-denominational Christian, students aren’t required to practice Christianity to attend.
Mann said Oak Park and River Forest have 12 faith-based schools, while Austin only has two: Chicago Jesuit Academy and Christ the King Jesuit College Prep. And the population of Oak Park is about half that of Austin.
“We’re not against public schools in any way. We’re just giving people another option,” said Mann, who has attended and taught at public schools.
Of the over 300 students who will attend the Field School in the fall, about 24% are from Oak Park and River Forest, over 27% are from Austin, and the rest are from the western suburbs and West Side neighborhoods of Chicago.
There were also several Austinites who attended the Field School at Calvary – which grew from 45 students to 150, the capacity for the space – and many came to the Field School’s north building when it opened in 2022. But the following year, the students grew beyond capacity again and middle schoolers moved back to Calvary.
Mann is looking forward to having all Field School students on the same campus again. While students used to have a service hour, where older students read and did activities with younger ones, that changed when the middle schoolers moved to Calvary. Without it, Mann said the students are missing out on meaningful, organic relationships with each other.
“A lot of modern life can be alienating,” Mann said. “There are such racial and wealth segments in the community, and that’s not good for us.” He added, “We’re a school that values diversity a lot, and that means bringing together students of different ages too.”
Field School tuition is on a sliding scale. Mann said, though rare, high-income families with an adjusted gross income over $1.5 million could pay up to $18,000 for annual tuition. Families with adjusted gross incomes below $20,000 could pay $1,900, though an appeals process could cause that number to be lower still.
Half of the Field School’s seats are reserved for families living below the poverty line, while a quarter are reserved for low-income families and another quarter for those with high incomes.
The south building
This school year, all Field School students will learn out of the campus’ two buildings for the first time. The north building will mainly host pre-kindergarteners through third graders, while the south building will hold classrooms for fourth through eighth graders.
Architect Dwight Perkins designed Francis Scott Key Elementary’s south building in 1907 when he was the Chicago Board of Education’s architect. The north building opened in 1969 to accommodate a growing student population.
The south building is a historic landmark, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Because of that, the Field School was required to preserve certain elements of the structure, like its western facade that faces Frederick Douglass Academy High School.
To make the south building accessible, workers installed an elevator on the building’s north side, designing it to match the facade with raised panels.
The renovated south building consists of two floors above the ground level, which has two classrooms for the Field School’s “specials.” These aren’t full-time classrooms, but hold classes used for the likes of art or music. The Field School is also launching a woodshop class on the ground level to accommodate new “majors” for the middle schoolers.
Above the ground floor, many classrooms were renovated, but the floor plan remains the same.
The auditorium is on the south building’s second floor. While its original seats are still on the balcony, the Field School replaced the stage-level plastic chairs with pews. The pews came from a Catholic church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that closed. The church was constructed in 1901, so the pews match the early-1900s interior of the auditorium, an important aspect for the often-used room.
“We really value theater,” Mann said. Every year, Field School middle schoolers put on a play, where everyone must act or help produce the production. The elementary students watch the final performance.
The top floor holds the campus gym, which has a basketball court. Where four ladders once lined the wall for climbing exercises, a volunteer woodworker is finishing the ladders as decoration. The gym windows give students a glimpse of the Chicago skyline. Also outside the gym’s eastern windows, students can see the building that once housed the Austin branch of the YMCA.
“That’s an example of how disinvestment in Austin has taken buildings offline,” Mann said. The YMCA location had two gyms, which Austin has been without for over a decade. And while the neighboring Austin Town Hall has a gym, it prioritizes public use. To help fill the gap, the Field School’s gym is available to rent for anyone, from an organization looking for an indoor basketball court to a recreational league that wants a regular practice space.
The cafeteria remains in the north building, so students will traverse from one structure to another daily. Mann said someday he hopes the school can build an overhang from the north building to the south, but that addition would come much later.
Forming the Field School
In 2013, Francis Scott Key Public School closed when Chicago Public Schools flagged 50 schools as under-capacity and shuttered them. It sat vacant until the Field School closed on the property in 2018.
According to previous reporting by Austin Weekly News, some Austin residents were upset there wasn’t more community engagement before CPS sold the property to the Field School.
With its purchase, the Field School received a certificate of occupancy that it could move into one of the campus’ buildings, so long as it rehabilitated the other within three years of buying. It received a one-year extension because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The north building, with renovations totaling $4.5 million, opened in the fall of 2022. In 2024, construction started on the south building with about $18 million worth of funds. Half of that was financed by a historic tax credit – which encourages the rehabilitation of historic buildings – and new market tax credit, which encourages private investment in low-income communities. The Field School fundraised for the remaining $9 million.
The new Field School campus sits in Austin’s historic district, neighbored by Frederick Douglass Academy High School and the Austin branch of the Chicago Public Library – both of which partner with the Field School.
Students often take field trips to the library, which also sets up an annual back-to-school booth. Three Douglass students or alumni work at the Field School. And the high school’s Safe Passage crossing guards help Field School students cross the street, too. Mann said Field School staff and students make it a point to thank them. And every holiday season, the Field School puts on a Christmas program at the Kehrein Center for the Arts.
“It was a neat way to do more in Austin while we were based in Oak Park,” Mann said.
The Field School’s grand opening is on Aug. 16. There will be an open house from 2 to 4 p.m., when the ribbon cutting starts.