Evanston/Skokie School District 65 staff released their initial school closure and consolidation scenarios amid significant community anxiety at a Monday night board meeting.
After teachers, parents and staff across the district raised numerous concerns about school closures during public comment, board members spent most of their discussion time searching for an elusive Goldilocks zone. The board aims to save enough money by closing schools to preserve valued programs while not closing too many schools and overburdening the rest of the district, said Stacy Beardsley, assistant superintendent of performance management and accountability.
“This is our one shot to get this right,” board member Andrew Wymer said. “I don’t think we can come back to the community in two or three years and say we didn’t right-size.”
The board settled on closing three schools starting in the 2026-27 school year, but it didn’t agree on which three to close. It asked district staff for a new model showing the impact of closing Lincolnwood Elementary School and Kingsley Elementary School while converting the K-5 section of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Literary and Fine Arts School into a neighborhood school to potentially reduce the impact of closing a third school nearby.
District staff presented 13 potential three-school closure scenario options, two of which were officially recommended to the board. They recommended closing Lincolnwood and Kingsley in four of the five multi-school closure scenarios they recommended because both would contribute a small number of students to other schools within walking distance.
Monday night marked the latest chapter in Phase 3 of the district’s Structural Deficit Reduction Plan, which aims to secure long-term financial stability by netting a target $10 to 15 million in cuts, right-sizing the district to fill classrooms as enrollment declines and addressing outdated facilities across the district.
The board’s assessments about the decision ranged from “difficult” to “very, very difficult” to “difficult and painful” to “extremely difficult,” but none ventured to say it was impossible.
District 65 Chief Financial Officer Tamara Mitchell said Phase 3 began with the formation of subcommittees composed of around 60 parents, staff and community members. They acted as “thought partners” with district staff, and the Facilities Committee created and weighted five categories to consider for school closures in June, she said.
Mitchell emphasized that subcommittees did not drive district staff’s recommendations to the board. District staff evaluated scenarios involving the closures of zero to four schools. Decisions on which schools to close were based on the weighted categories — geography, equity, building cost, building functionality and building income — on a one-to-five scale, with the lowest scores suggesting minimal impact.
Board member Maria Opdycke noted that projections scenarios were only based on enrollment projections until 2030. She said she felt uncertain about making sweeping changes without knowing their long-term impact.
She added that some of the recommended scenarios would create imbalances in utilization rate, which measures enrollment as a percentage of a school’s capacity. Some schools would still be underutilized, while others would be overutilized as they took on students from closed schools, she said.
Beardsley said balancing those utilization rates would increase district transportation costs. It would also force more students to cross large roadways and place some students more than 1.5 miles from their school, requiring the district to bus them to school, she added.
Wymer said he was not willing to change the weighting or criteria determined in earlier meetings while making closure decisions.
“I think we have to stay consistent and just own that it reflects a certain degree of community will, as well as administrative leadership that brought it to us,” he said. “We have to work within that frame.”
During discussion, Board Vice President Nichole Pinkard suggested closing Dewey Elementary School, adding that the district could convert the K-5 grades in King Arts to a neighborhood school that would accept the former school’s students.
Initial projections reflected King Arts’ status as a choice-based magnet school, but the board’s requested model includes Pinkard’s suggestion.
“If you model King Arts as a (K-5) neighborhood school, Dewey becomes plausible,” Pinkard said. “Without it, Dewey cannot close because it captures the entire middle.”
Even in district staff’s best-case four-school closure scenario, the district would still need to cut around $1 million in programming and staffing to meet its target of $11.8 million in savings, according to district staff’s presentation to the board.
Student Programming committee member Terri Shepard said the number of people on her committee dropped from approximately 24 initially to around seven due to the “grueling” hours spent on the project. Her job was to evaluate extracurricular activities such as programming at the McGaw YMCA or the Books & Breakfast program, in which NU students and community volunteers provide breakfast and homework assistance to District 65 students, she said.
“We know how much many of you need these services, but as honest as I can be, the funds are lacking to continue programming as we have in the past,” she said in a presentation to the board.
Evanston resident Meghan Thomas criticized the board for not consulting teachers and staff in their decision making. She questioned how reallocating staff to new schools would affect student outcomes and said she didn’t trust the board to make fiscally responsible decisions.
She implored the district to slow down the SDRP process and include more teacher input.
At previous community engagement points in the SDRP process, the district has engaged staff for feedback. According to the district’s website, there were no staff engagement sessions over the summer, when the district released its criteria for evaluating schools.
The district will review updated scenarios at its next board meeting Oct. 27 after collecting community feedback in four sessions across the district Oct. 14 to 16.
“Making these decisions too quickly without input from all stakeholders, like your employees, can lead to catastrophic outcomes for students,” Thomas told the board. “I keep hearing you say you’re putting students at the center of these decisions. I see no evidence of that in any of the things that you have shared.”
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