Regardless of which school had their allegiance, Evanston/Skokie School District 65 community members expressed distrust in the board’s ability to effectively close three schools in Phase 3 of its Structural Deficit Reduction Plan at community feedback sessions this week.
District administrators solicited feedback to inform the Board of Education’s deliberations over three-school closure scenarios last discussed at a special meeting Tuesday. In collaboration with a group of planning subcommittees, the district used five criteria to score scenarios — ranging from zero to four school closures — from least to most impactful.
Community members criticized almost every step of the process, even going back to the district’s 2017 property tax referendum, in 90-minute feedback sessions held at each of the district’s three middle schools and Fleetwood-Jourdain Community Center from Oct. 14-16.
“There’s a credibility issue that I don’t think they’re willing to address because I think it would involve a bit of introspection that they don’t want,” said Chute Middle School parent Galen Burghardt. “A lot of us don’t trust a lot of what’s going on, especially given the track record in the district’s accounting over the past decade or so.”
The district has already reduced spending by almost $20 million in Phases 1 and 2 of the SDRP, in hopes of reaching fiscal sustainability. District 65 aims to eliminate an additional $11.8 million in spending for the 2026-27 school year through the school closures.
The board settled on closing three schools at its Sept. 29 meeting and has honed in on the two lowest-scoring scenarios: closing Lincolnwood, Kingsley and Washington Elementary Schools in one or closing the former two schools and Dawes Elementary School in the other.
A third, proposed by Board Vice President Nichole Pinkard, would close Lincolnwood, Kingsley and Dewey Elementary Schools while converting the K-8 magnet Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Literary and Fine Arts School into a K-5 neighborhood school. Projections for that scenario will be announced Friday, said Stacy Beardsley, assistant superintendent for performance management and accountability.
Even if the district closed three schools, saving around $6.3 million, it would still have to cut about $1.8 million in staffing and programming, Chief Financial Officer Tamara Mitchell said.
After administrators presented their scenarios and the SDRP to each audience, attendees sent in questions through a QR code, some of which were answered in real time. A public comment portion was added following feedback from the first session, Beardsley said. The district received over 900 questions across the four events, she added.
“I really appreciate the volume of turnout that we have gotten,” she said. “I think there’s a pattern in some of the questions that we know we need to either better communicate or help to problem-solve with the board.”
Parents rally to preserve school programming, protect students
Community members raised concerns about district staff’s recommended cuts to Two-Way Immersion programs, which help Spanish-speaking students develop language proficiency skills in both Spanish and English. In every scenario, the TWI program at Willard Elementary would close, and TWI students would move to the new Foster School.
“It seems like it’s an attack on the Latinos,” said Washington parent Karen Jimenez. “They’re messing with the community’s kids, not just Washington. I mean every other school. They’re messing with their kids in Evanston, and that’s not fair. As a mom, that really makes me angry.”
Washington and Dawes have two of the highest proportions of Hispanic students in the district, Dawes parent Patrick Combs said. Many parents worried that the potential closures would put immigrant students at higher risk, forcing them to walk longer distances to school.
After U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained multiple people blocks away from Dawes on Sunday morning, and ICE took at least one person just outside Dawes Thursday morning, Combs said students cannot afford to lose safe spaces at these schools.
“With schools closing, my biggest fear is that with further distances, families will have to travel to get their kids to school, and it just exposes more people to potential kidnappings and abductions,” Combs said. “It just makes it harder to be safe. What we don’t need right now is things that make it harder to be safe.”
Another priority for parents was clarification on the consequences for Title 1 schools, which receive federal funding to support students from low-income households. District 65 has seven Title 1 schools, including Washington and Dawes. Beardsley assured the community that the district would work closely with school leaders, teachers and service providers to create a “transition plan” for students if a Title 1 school were to close.
Attendees also questioned the potential closing of schools that fully comply with the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Some parents pointed out that students who benefit from an accessible school that ends up closing may be forced to attend one that doesn’t meet their needs. Five of the 11 elementary schools evaluated for ADA compliance — excluding the Foster School and the imminently closing Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies — received a full score, including King Arts, Dawes and Kingsley.
King Arts parent Jaimie Wallace said many in the community don’t appreciate the value of special programming offered at the magnet school, which could be at risk in Pinkard’s proposed third scenario.
The school’s K-8 Rigorous Individualized Specialized Education program, which Wallace said supports students with moderate to severe disabilities, would be split into a K-5 program at Willard and a 6-8 program at Haven Middle School, according to Beardsley. The split would disrupt support systems for some of the district’s most vulnerable students, Wallace said.
Wallace, who also served on the SDRP student programming subcommittee, expressed skepticism regarding a proposal floated by board member Omar Salem on Tuesday, which would close schools one after another instead of all at once.
“If you’re on a list, and you’re set for closure in two years or three years, how does that school function in those two or three years?” she asked. “What happens to the student morale? What happens to the staff morale? What happens to those support structures those kids have been relying on?”
Community presses for long-term vision
Speaking in her personal capacity as a young parent, Ald. Parielle Davis (7th) voiced dissatisfaction with what she deemed a “lack of long-term strategic planning” and asked why declining enrollment levels weren’t identified sooner. She said she is hesitant to believe that the district has a plan for the next 10 years, garnering applause from other community members.
Beardsley said the district will hold one more feedback session with its Bilingual Parent Advisory Committee Tuesday. Then, a partner at Northwestern, who structured the sessions, will distill the feedback into patterns the administration can present to the board. She said the feedback will be ready by the board’s Nov. 3 meeting, if not by the Oct. 27 meeting.
As the first feedback session at Chute Middle School wrapped up, Superintendent Angel Turner thanked her staff for the long days and nights they put in to develop the SDRP.
“We are not intentionally trying to harm any of the children or family of this community,” she said. “This district has a financial problem, and we have done a Herculean job really trying to get this under control the past two years. We want to continue to do that as we move forward because that is what we owe the taxpayers in this community.”
But for Michael Dice, a Lincolnwood parent and senior learning engineer at NU, the biggest concern is how rushed the process seems to be.
With five of the seven board members newly elected in the last two years, he said he believed the board could have taken a slower, steadier approach.
“It’s just heartbreaking what people are going through right now, and I just don’t think it has to be this way,” Dice said. “They have so many new board members that are asking questions, that want to talk about alternative ideas right now and want to slow this process down, and I think the administration needs to listen to them and to the community.”
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
X: @sidvaraman
Related Stories:
— Under new leadership, District 65 looks for wiggle room in 3-school closure plan
— Devon Horton indictment investigation began in 2023, board leadership says
— ‘One shot to get this right’: D65 board mulls over school closure scenarios
