Evanston/Skokie School District 65 will allow seventh and eighth grade students at the Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies to finish classes there for the 2024-25 school year under a modified staffing plan, the district announced in a Friday email to parents.
The decision supersedes District 65’s initial plan to transfer Bessie Rhodes’ seventh and eighth graders to their neighborhood schools after Friday, when the district’s first trimester ends. The district attributed this decision to “difficulty staffing for several key positions” in an Oct. 16 email.
Families and students protested what they called a lack of transparency and communication from the district several times following the announcement, including before an Oct. 28 board meeting.
Following a parent meeting the following day, the district sent affected families a survey asking them to rank four options for their children’s school assignments. Of the 36 families that completed the survey, 21 of them — roughly 60% — selected remaining at Bessie Rhodes as their first choice, according to results released to parents Monday.
About two-thirds of the families surveyed listed moving their children to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Literary and Fine Arts School, which is located in Evanston’s 2nd Ward, as their first or second choice, while about one-third did the same for an option splitting students up by grade.
Amid staffing shortages affecting Bessie Rhodes’ sixth- through eighth-grade classes, Bessie Rhodes Assistant Principal Sarah Antrim-Graf will continue teaching Spanish, while content directors and facilitators around the district will fill in for classes in other subjects, according to Friday’s email.
The district will “continue to assess monolingual seventh and eighth grade staffing and student numbers,” and it will communicate in advance if it intends to make further changes before the end of the school year or start of the 2025-26 year, Superintendent Angel Turner said in the email.
After calling families Wednesday and Thursday to verify their decisions, the district wrote in the email that 14 families will transition their students — mostly eighth graders — to King Arts, while seven will transition their students to their neighborhood schools. All changes will start Nov. 18.
Bessie Rhodes remains set to close after the 2025-26 school year.
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Related Stories:
— Teacher shortages, “mismanagement” plague Bessie Rhodes, parents say
— District 65 delays decision on closing 7th, 8th grade classes at Bessie Rhodes
— ‘We pick here’: Bessie Rhodes community continues protesting planned 7th, 8th grade closures
