Potential D65 school consolidation, closure criteria emphasizes walkability, marginalized student impact

Daily file photo by Seeger Gray

District 65’s proposed school closure and consolidation criteria are grouped into five categories: geography, equity, building cost, building functionality and building income.

Anavi Prakash, Senior Staffer

June 24, 2025

The Evanston/Skokie School District 65 Board of Education heard potential school consolidation and closure criteria at its meeting Monday night.

Three community committees — focused on district finances, facilities and student programming, respectively — met twice a month from April to June to create criteria for the district to base its decisions on. At this point in the process, no official decisions have been made regarding school closures or consolidations.

These criteria recommendations are part of Phase 3 of the district’s Structural Deficit Reduction Plan, which began in February 2024, to achieve financial sustainability. The district’s goal for Phase 3 is to reduce spending by $10 million to $15 million, adding to the about $20 million it cut through Phases 1 and 2 of the SDRP.

“While this is uncomfortable, we’ve got some challenges in front of us that we will continue to consider how this impacts the community and the students we serve,” Susan Harkin, the district’s SDRP consultant, said.

The proposed criteria are grouped into five categories created by the Facilities Committee: geography, equity, building cost, building functionality and building income. The committee visited all the district’s schools to help inform their criterion choices, according to committee member Elliott Dudnik.

The category that carries the most weight is geography, at 32%. Its criteria include looking at school walkability from students’ homes — set at maximum of 0.75 miles away — and transportation costs.

The second most important category is equity, at 22%. It considers the number of students from historically marginalized groups that would be impacted by each scenario.

The district will use these categories to create score cards for each school which will help inform the committees’ work to create potential school closure and consolidation scenarios, said Stacy Beardsley, assistant superintendent of performance management and accountability.

“The committee found it very important to stay focused on deficit reduction,” Beardsley said. “They found it very important to make sure that they were actually criteria.”

Community members will have the opportunity to provide feedback on these categories and the criteria at meetings on June 24 and 25.

The Finance Committee looked at what the district is calling “the district’s math problem” — ways to address the structural deficit and facility improvement needs, which currently amount to about $188 million.

Committee member Kevin Jackson said the district has had budgetary issues since 2003, where the only years the district had a sustainable amount of cash on hand were years after a passed referendum.

According to board policy, the district should have 90 days of cash on hand at all times. For fiscal year 2025, the district is projected to have 71 days of cash on hand.

Jackson added that the district has to see how its facility plan, enrollment and budget work together to reach fiscal sustainability.

“We really need all three of those to really work together in more of an integrated operating plan, as opposed to just a budget,” he said.

The committee also proposed ways to reduce expenditures, which included the potential closing of two to four schools and a reduction in early education bussing. Revenue-increasing methods included optimizing operation efficiency and selling bonds for capital.

The Student Programming Committee evaluated the district’s African Centered Curriculum, Two-Way Immersion, early childhood education and magnet school programming. The committee’s primary goal was to make recommendations to the Facilities Committee about the resources the programs needed to be successful.

For TWI, the committee recommended having at least one program in every middle school feeder pattern. The committee also recommended looking at how the Foster School’s general education curriculum can align with or be replaced by the ACC.

For magnet school programming, which is currently only at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Literary and Fine Arts School, committee member Cara Wellvang said it is essential that the school still be accessible to students in all neighborhoods.

Wellvang added that the committee recommends that early childhood programming be shifted to a neighborhood school model in an effort to reduce transportation barriers.

The committees will modify their recommendations as needed based on community feedback, Beardsley said.

According to Harkin, these recommendations will then be combined to create potential closure and consolidation scenarios, which will be presented to the board in the fall.

“There’s going to have to be emerging and marrying between the groups,” she said. “There’s going to be tension between these three groups … that, to me, is the place that if we facilitate that appropriately, we get to the right answer, because at the end of the day, we’re talking about our kids, we’re talking about our community.”

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