Western Specialty Contractors – Peoria Branch recently replaced the roof on the Kewanee Life Skills Re-Entry Center in Kewanee, IL.

Located at 2021 Kentville Road, Kewanee teaches valuable life skills and prepares incarcerated individuals for reentry back into society. Kewanee offers educational, job readiness and cognitive behavior therapy courses to individuals who have one to four years left on their sentences. The multi-security facility opened in February 2017 and was previously opened as a juvenile detention center in 2001.

The facility’s roof had weathered shingles that were disintegrating and blowing off. The Illinois Department of Corrections hired Western in March 2023 to replace over 110,000 sq ft of total roofing on six housing pods, plus the maintenance and security buildings.

Western started the project by hiring a fencing subcontractor to widen the interior gates to allow enough room for construction equipment and cranes to pass through it. On some lifts, crews were able to use a large crane to lift materials into position from outside the double barbwire fence, which helped speed up logistics as the crane would not fit through the gates.

Western’s scope of work included:

• Removing the roof shingles and plywood, leaving existing 4” Polyiso insulation over the metal and concrete decks
• Mechanically fastening a layer of 2.1-inch nailbase insulation to the concrete deck
• Adhering PACLAD HT ice and water shield over the wood
• Replacement of expansion joints with PACLAD approved and warranted details
• Installing a mechanically, double-locked PACLAD Tite Loc Plus, 24-gauge Kynar steel roof system with a 20-year weather-tight warranty

 

Entering the secure facility required Western’s crews to keep strict logs of the tools they were using, which were inspected by the gate guard every day. The secure facility also posed other challenges for Western’s crews.

“There were numerous locked gates we had to pass through to get to each roof area; a lot of time spent on the project just getting setup every day,” said Assistant Branch Manager Jared Osterman. “The property was massive. Just moving through the grounds required the use of ATVs to get the crews where they needed to work. We did have to work around barbed wire in certain areas and hired a specialty fence subcontractor to remove it and replace it to get the roof flashed in properly.”

Western was able to complete the large project by November 2025 on budget.