CSS

Have you ever wondered what is in the big metal building that you pass on the way to Fountain Stone Theaters? It is the headquarters of Cooperative School Services, an agency that provides services to nine area school corporations: Benton Community, Frontier, Kankakee Valley, North Newton, North White, Rensselaer Central, South Newton, Tri-County, and West Central. The idea is that there are specialized services that a school may need, such as speech therapy, psychology services, occupation therapy, and various other services for students with physical handicaps, developmental disabilities, emotional disorders, or learning disabilities, but the school may have only a few students who need these services, not enough to justify hiring a full time person to deal with them. The solution is to hire a few specialists who can provide the services and to share them with other school corporations. That is what the Cooperative School Services does.

 The building that they are in was dedicated at the end of 2007. Before that CSS had offices in several of the compartments in the old Sears Building in downtown Rensselaer. The building is functional and not an architectural masterpiece. You enter on the west. To the south is a large training room/classroom/conference room. To the north is a huge area of cubicles that takes up more than half the building. CSS employs a lot of people but they do not spend much time in their cubicles. They spend their time on the job out in the nine school corporations that CSS serves.

 Below is the cubicle room from another angle.

Cooperative School Services began in 1969 and today serves 2100 students in the nine school corporations. The executive board consists of the superintendents of the nine school corporations.

The website for CSS is cooperativeschoolservices.org. Check it out to learn more about them.