Instead of walking to a neighborhood school, students in the Fifth Ward catch a bus each morning and travel to north Evanston as part of a decades-old effort to desegregate District 65 schools. Today, parents in the ward are urging the school board to take action to bring their students back home.
Some residents of the Fifth Ward, a historically black community, want the district to build a local school to address overcrowding and strengthen neighborhood bonds, said recently re-elected school board member Jerome Summers.
“There have been suggestions about redistricting from one school to another or building additions,” Summers said. “By the time you do all of that, you could actually build a school in the Fifth Ward and solve a whole lot of problems.”
Summers was one of the first students to get bused away from the Fifth Ward to Lincolnwood Elementary School, and he said his experience inspires him to promote a Fifth Ward school. During the city’s movement toward voluntary school desegregation, the district closed Foster School in the Fifth Ward and dispersed students among schools in north Evanston.
Summers said he thinks busing detaches parents from the schools and children from their community, a belief that leads him to fight for local education that is actually local.
“I don’t know if it’s good for the district, but it’s absolutely good for our community,” Summers said.
Consider “Willard Island,” a six-block area in the Second and Fifth wards assigned to the Willard Elementary School attendance area. The area received attention earlier this year when the district considered reassigning students to other schools, both to alleviate overcrowding and to address concerns about the distance between Willard and the Fifth Ward.
Given the choice to leave, some parents from the neighborhood asked that their children remain at Willard. About 50 percent of students from Willard Island attend Willard, said Jean Fies, the school’s PTA co-president.
“There’s a tension between the generation of 50- and 60-year-olds who integrated the schools and feel they suffered emotional harm in the process and current families that have very different stories than that generation,” said Mary Rita Luecke, who served on the District 65 school board from 2001 to 2009. “I really think the voice that has not been heard is the voice of the current parents and the younger generation.”
Summers wants to address this generational divide.
“They don’t have a point of reference,” he said. “We have two generations of black families that have never gone to school in their own neighborhood. We’re like the last of a dying breed.”
The school board doesn’t plan to readdress the possibility of a Fifth Ward school in the near future, but Luecke thinks the discussion will continue as long as Summers remains on the board. The issue was raised three times during Luecke’s eight-year tenure on the school board.
Staying true to his campaign, Summers promises to keep fighting for the cause.
“I’ll fight like hell for a school in the Fifth Ward,” he said. “There’s a wound that has not yet been healed.”
