While the Northwestern campus emptied for Spring Break, Evanston’s City Council used the peace and quiet to firm up plans for the tower at 708 Church St., and the Evanston/Skokie School District 65 Board of Education made two controversial decisions.
In its March 23 meeting, the council gave its final approval to the tower, which has been the subject of a two-year debate. The aldermen gave developers extra time to build in order to accommodate for the current financial crisis.
“We fully expect the economy to recover,” Ald. Delores Holmes (5th) said. “In case the economy doesn’t recover, they have until 2013 to start building.”
In District 65, Haven Middle School students who have lost sleep over their school’s possible name change will soon be able to make it up in the mornings.
Starting next fall, all Evanston middle schools, except for magnet schools, will start at 8:30 a.m., half an hour later than in the past, said School Board Vice President Jerome Summers.
“The argument was that middle-schoolers need more sleep,” Summers said. “Your brain grows the most in middle school, except for when you’re a baby, and then the hormones go wild.”
The original proposal, made by the district administration, called for swapping the start times of the district’s elementary and middle schools, so that elementary schools would start at 8 a.m., with middle schools starting an hour later.
“It kind of caused an uproar,” Summers said. “You’re disrupting the lives of 4,000 families. We came to a solution to leave things as they are for the elementary and the magnet schools.”
The board also voted to table a controversial proposal to rename Haven, 2417 Prairie Ave., after Mayor Lorraine Morton, a motion Summers introduced.
“For a person who has been generally considered one who unites our city, there was a lot of animosity,” he said. “It got very racially charged. It just got really ugly.”
Summers said he had doubts about renaming the school “Morton-Haven Middle School,” since changing the building’s name could set a bad precedent.
“The building already has a name,” he said. “My concern was 30 or 50 years from now, someone would come and take off her name.”
The board member said he spoke to several aldermen about the possibility of naming another building after Morton next month after she completes her 16 years as mayor. He said other choices for honoring the mayor might be more appropriate, such as renaming the civic center or the library.
“She’s not just a school icon, she’s a civic icon,” Summers said.
Terri Shepard, a former board member and district parent, argued against putting aside the motion, saying the district should honor Morton independently from the city.
“The city and the school district are two different governing entities,” Shepard said, reflecting on the meeting. “Whether or not the city is going to honor her has nothing to do with what District 65 is going to do.”
Holmes, who spoke with Summers, said the idea would be up for discussion in the city council after Morton steps down.
“We can’t do anything until the mayor’s term is up,” Holmes said. “We will need to discuss that as a council and it’s inappropriate to be discussing it right now, in my opinion.”
