Seven months after voters elected them to the Evanston/Skokie District 65 Board of Education, three new members will take their seats tonight alongside the four returning members at a special meeting to mark the biannual changing of the board.
Bob Eder, Mary Rita Luecke and Hecky Powell were elected in April’s municipal elections. Mary Erickson was re-elected to a second four-year term. Current board members Rosie Rees, Lisa Kupferberg and Walter Carlson, the president of the board, will step down after serving two terms.
Erickson and board member Betsy Sagan said they will miss working with the departing board members.
“I don’t think people realize the contributions of those three people,” Erickson said. “If anybody has a right to look at Evanston and say, ‘I made it the way it is,’ it is them.”
Rees praised the board for beginning to address the minority achievement gap, an effort that has been led by Superintendent Hardy Ray Murphy since the board hired him in 1999 after a 14-month search.
“The best thing this board did was to find Hardy Murphy as superintendent for the district,” Rees said.
Erickson said another important accomplishment of the board was the education center, which broke ground in September after overcoming neighborhood opposition in the spring. The center will house an early childhood education program and administrative offices.
The board also has tapped into Evanston’s educational resources through partnerships with Northwestern and National-Louis University, Erickson said.
But the new board still faces challenges, many of them financial, she said. In September the board approved an operating budget with a $1.5 million deficit, something the board should work “in a constructive manner” to avoid next year, Erickson said.
Eder said the board must work harder to implement the teaching improvement initiatives it has initiated in the last few years to address the achievement gap.
“While the pace of change has been significant, that in itself won’t be enough,” Eder said. “We need to accelerate the pace of change.”
Luecke said she would like the board to address problems in the middle schools in the next four years. “We need to look and see if we are already doing everything we can to prepare them for high school,” Luecke said.
Luecke is an attorney, Eder is the chief financial officer of Association House, a Chicago social services agency, and Powell owns Hecky’s Barbecue, 1902 Green Bay Road.
Eder said the departing board members should be complimented, pointing out that board members are not paid and they hear more often from agitated community members than from supporters. But Eder said he believed in the mission of the D65 school board.
“You do it because it’s important, and you can make a positive contribution to the community,” Eder said.
