The Evanston Township High School District 202 Board of Education unanimously passed its Fiscal Year 2025 Capital Improvement Plan and held an Indigenous Peoples Day land acknowledgement ceremony at its Monday night meeting.
The district’s capital improvement budget is set at $9.8 million this year. The board approved a $77 million capital improvement budget for the fiscal years 2024 to 2028.
District 202’s CIP includes its centennial project, which includes several renovations to ETHS in its 100th year, according to Kendra Williams, District 202’s chief financial officer.
The largest renovation in the centennial plan is planned for the school’s Arts and Innovation Wing, Williams said.
Renovations to ETHS, the first of which were completed this calendar year, aim to make learning spaces more adaptable to the school’s needs, said Michael Dolter, a senior project architect at Perkins&Will.
Pete Bavis, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, emphasized that flexible spaces allow for courses to be changed and adapted to current needs.
“What we want to do is build our rooms so that they’re flexible for the next 50 to 75 years,” Bavis said. “And that’s a major task, but it’s a task that curricularly we welcome, because then we’re not confined by spaces that can only do XYZ.”
Perkins&Will has completed projects for the school’s alumni hall and health sciences classrooms, Dolter said. He added that his team is planning to begin renovations to the exterior of the school building in the summer of 2025.
Williams said the projects until next summer are confirmed because the district is not in debt this fiscal year. She said the district will pivot its plans based on funding in future years.
“We know what we want to accomplish, but we also know we have to be responsive to budgetary restrictions,” Williams said. “And so that is the plan all through this project.”
Toward the beginning of the meeting, Board President Pat Savage-Williams read the district’s land acknowledgement during an Indigenous Peoples Day ceremony. ETHS held events related to Indigenous Peoples Day during school hours and hosted a powwow in collaboration with the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian — open to the Evanston community — in the evening.
The land acknowledgement is the first one the school has had in its 100-year history in its current building, Superintendent Marcus Campbell said.
The acknowledgement is displayed by the main entrance to the school and designed by Eva Oldman, an Odawa and Northern Arapaho graphic designer.
The board also heard an update on the two-year Transdisciplinary Science curriculum that was introduced in the 2022-23 school year. The program is for students who previously would have been enrolled in the school’s Biology with Support course.
The TS curriculum merges biology, chemistry and literacy skills to allow students to grow as STEM learners, said ETHS science teacher TaRhonda Woods, who helped develop the curriculum.
Curriculum co-creator Patricia Delacruz, an ETHS English teacher, emphasized that the program is important for allowing students to get the “holistic academic support” they deserve.
Later in the meeting, Carrie Levy, the director of research, evaluation and assessment, introduced the new ETHS Data Dashboard to the board. The dashboard will be updated quarterly with data about student attendance, discipline, academic supports and student services, Levy said.
“This quarterly data is different from the annual, historical data,” Levy said. “It’s more timely, more present. It’s more actionable, is the intent.”
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