While Evanston’s educational leaders gathered Monday night to discuss their increased collaboration, parents and students said they could be doing more.
“It was a lovefest. Everything’s rosy. Isn’t that nice?” parent Jonathan Baum said sarcastically about the meeting, which brought together the school boards of Evanston’s elementary and high schools. “It’s wasteful to use all of your time patting yourself on the back when you don’t ask what isn’t working.”
The annual joint meeting highlighted four different areas of collaboration between District 202, which covers Evanston Township High School, and District 65, which covers all of Evanston’s elementary and middle schools. The topics were differentiated instruction, bilingual instruction, special education transitions and a joint mathematics initiative.
For each category, administrators from each district presented a PowerPoint slide show and answered questions.
On the topic of differentiated instruction, each of the district’s curriculum directors explained how they were implementing the new approach to teaching, which focuses on how to teach a variety of students at different educational levels in one classroom.
“It’s about teaching students that intelligence is malleable,” said Laura Cooper, the director for District 202. “Students do come in with confidence in their ability to learn, but over the course of their education, they face challenges and think they’re inadequate.”
In the second and third segments, the presentations focused on how the districts were ensuring that English language learners and special needs students experienced a smooth transition between middle school and high school.
The final portion centered on a new study that both districts are participating in to improve instruction of Algebra I, a course they described as a “crucial step towards high school success.”
The board members were visibly pleased by the presentations.
“This was very informative,” District 65 board member Katie Bailey said as the meeting drew to a close. “I like the discussion on how everybody is working together.”
The sentiment from the other side of the room was markedly different. While parents and students in attendance acknowledged the progress, they said the districts could still be do better.
In a speech to the boards, Baum criticized a “critical” disparity that allows Evanston eighth-graders to easily pass District 65 standardized testing but then somehow fail District 202 standardized testing the next year.
“How can we have any progress if we can’t even agree on how to measure that progress?” asked Baum, a former member of the District 65 Board of Education.
After the meeting, Baum said the presentations “lacked hard information” and focused more on each district’s individual efforts than they did on collaboration.
Students outside the meeting said the districts weren’t doing enough to prepare eighth-graders for ninth grade.
“They should work together,” ETHS junior Sally McBratney said. “When I was in middle school, they didn’t do anything to prepare me for high school. So when I got there, I felt unprepared.”
In her presentation, Sue Schultz, District 65 assistant superintendent for school curriculum and operations, said the district does work to prepare their students for high school. She stressed that each middle school staff member has a partner high school staff member to ensure the curriculum is fluid.
Cooper brought up Access ETHS, a summer program which prepares incoming freshmen for the school and counts as an elective credit.
But several District 65 board members asked questions about the program, showing their unfamiliarity with it. Administrators acknowledged there was room for improvement.
“We do collaborate on many, many things, but there are always things we can do better,” said Richard Bowers, ETHS associate principal for grades nine and 10. “Part of the issue is always time to do it and getting people free to do it.”
Parents said they understood the constraints on working together, but urged the districts to make a better effort.
“The bottom line is there are more places where we can collaborate,” said parent Gretchen Livingston, who is running for school board in this April’s election. “I don’t think anybody is looking for more meetings. But I’m talking about something really concrete and substantive.”
