Music and laughter filled Oakton Elementary School’s auditorium as families celebrated the school’s African Centered Curriculum Crossover Ceremony in May. 

An annual tradition, the event gives students the opportunity to perform songs and dances, and meet their teacher for the next school year. Fifth grade students cross over a physical bridge and meet their middle school teachers. 

When students cross over, they are also signaling the end of their time in the African Centered Curriculum program, a K-5 curriculum that centers around the identity and heritage of people of African descent. 

Oakton is home to the only program of its kind in Evanston/Skokie School District 65 — and the entire country. Now, some District 65 community members are advocating for ACC to be added to a second school in the district, Foster School, when it opens for the 2026-27 school year. 

At Oakton, each grade level has about 15 students participating in the program. For these students, each day starts with the ACC Creed, a chant that helps students reaffirm that they are capable of being successful learners, believe in their teachers and are ready to do well. 

Every time she hears the Creed, ACC parent Beth Ashworth said she cries because of the power behind its words.

For Elizabeth Rolewicz, another ACC parent, the crossover ceremony was another part of the “wonderful” experience her fifth grade son has had in the program, but she said it was also bittersweet. 

“I’m sad that he’s leaving because that level of education will sort of end in a sense that when he goes to middle school, there’s nothing there that is similar to ACC and that kind of African diaspora focus of learning,” Rolewicz said. “It does not exist at the middle school.”

This year’s crossover ceremony marked 19 years of the program’s existence. 

The ACC program was founded by a group of District 65 community members and educators after district data that showed that Black students had consistently lower test scores than their white peers. 

ACC co-founder Terri Shepard — who had previously been Oakton’s PTA president — and her husband, who was interested in African history, recognized that part of the problem was that Black students didn’t see themselves in the content they were engaging with. 

After researching programs similar to the ACC and building a curriculum, the founders presented it to the District 65 Board of Education. It took two attempts before the board approved the program, Shepard said. 

Shepard said the idea was to have two strands of the curriculum — one at Oakton and one at Kingsley Elementary School, which is within walking distance from the historically Black 5th Ward. She added that this was important for the success of ACC, so teachers from both strands could collaborate to make the program stronger. 

The program was only approved to be at Oakton in 2006, and since then, has not expanded to any other school. 

Brande Otis, a postdoctoral fellow in Black Studies at Northwestern, has done work with ACC since December. At a May school board meeting, Otis said that students in the ACC program have performed at the same level or better than their peers. 

She added that in her work, she has seen that ACC is a space for everyone. 

“It’s not a Black-only space,” Otis said. “Anybody can join the program, but it is a space that assumes and celebrates Blackness, and that’s something that’s really hard to come by in public schools. And ACC is a space where Blackness is not just like a token of celebration, but it is something that is real and celebrated and uplifted.”

Community advocates for ACC at Foster School 

At recent school board meetings, Shepard and a group of community members have been advocating for the ACC program to be part of Foster School’s curriculum. 

The original Foster School was closed in 1979 and its students were bussed to other schools in the city — a practice that still occurs. 

Citing the original goal of also having the program at Kingsley because of its proximity to the 5th Ward, Shepard said having ACC at Foster School is important because it represents the community the school is in.

“How could you be returning a school to the 5th Ward and not have a single program in that school that’s designed for Black people? Black people were the community that you devastated when you took the school out of their community,” Shepard said. 

Currently, the Foster School is slated to have two Two-Way Immersion strands along with two general education strands, as many families from the Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies, which has wall-to-wall TWI, will have the Foster School as their neighborhood school in the 2026-27 school year. 

Fifth Ward resident Jerome Summers, who was on the District 65 Board of Education that approved the ACC program, attended Foster School before it was shut down. He said that ACC empowers Black students — something that was the norm at the Foster School, where teachers were students’ advocates and mentors.

“It was a safe place, a nurturing place, a place where I couldn’t imagine a better environment than that,” Summers said. 

Otis said she has found the advocacy to have ACC at Foster School to be directly connected to what it means to return a school — and its “magic” —  to the community. 

She added that, to the community members she has spoken to, Foster School was a place where Black families knew they would be “taken care of,” something she said is not always true in public schools today. 

After Foster School closed, Summers was bussed to Lincolnwood Elementary School, where he said his teachers called him a “problem child” for no clear reason. To him, he wasn’t the problem, but his new school — where he didn’t feel supported — was. 

Summers said that not having a program like ACC that supports Black students at the new Foster School would be “a slap in the face.” He added that students who are bussed into a community aren’t completely a part of the community built in the neighborhoods. 

“The result of that is those kids never feel like they’re the jewel of their community and brightness and hope for the future,” Summers said. 

Both Shepard and Summers said that there should be room for both TWI and ACC at Foster School.

No official decisions have been made yet about whether ACC will be part of the school’s curriculum. The district’s Structural Deficit Reduction Plan Student Programming Committee has looked at the program in its work to help the district eliminate its $13.2 million deficit and reach financial sustainability. 

Incoming Foster School Principal Charlise Berkel has worked in both the TWI and ACC programs at District 65. 

“Right now it’s about active listening to hear the community’s concerns to help build my vision,” Berkel said.

The district did not respond to a request for comment. 

Oakton community continues exploring ACC opportunities 

Otis, through her work with the ACC program, is also one of the founders of the ACC Parent Committee, created through a now-cancelled National Science Foundation grant. 

Due to the loss of funding, the committee is now working to reshape its work, but its purpose is to do outreach and plan enrichment events for families in the program, Otis said. 

Ashworth and her husband, Andrew Biliter, are part of the committee to be more involved and develop structured events to build community around, Biliter said. 

They joined ACC because Biliter said he felt the white-dominant organizations he worked for were not as successful in bridging racial divides. The ACC program, as a Black space, however, was different, he said. 

For Ashworth, the program also develops values that build a more positive school environment, she said.

“It’s so focused on the values of community and working together and raising kids who can embody those values,” Ashworth said. “Regardless of whether your kid is even in the program or not, that has an effect on the culture of the school at large.”

Rolewicz said she’s concerned about losing these values at the middle school level, where there is no ACC program. To supplement what her son will miss, her family has sought out Black mentorship programs in the community, like Black SonRISE, which provides Black male elementary school students with literacy support, and Camp Kuumba, a summer camp for students of color in Evanston. 

Shepard is part of the ACC Parent Committee to provide historical information about the program. She said she is excited to see what the parents do to develop the program, something she feels the district hasn’t invested in.

She said she credits much of the program’s longevity and success to the original group of teachers in the program, some of whom continue teaching ACC and have passed their knowledge on to newer teachers in the program. 

Shepard added that having ACC at Foster School won’t just benefit the students, but also help the program continue to exist. 

“You would still have the two strands — that is important for the survival of the program,” Shepard said. “I think the district can make anything they want work. They can do anything they want if they want. It’s just a matter of how bad they want it.” 

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