Children darted around the gymnasium, hula hoops in hand, while families ate together in the cafeteria across the hall at Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies’ annual Fall Fest on Saturday.
Outside, Fifth Ward resident Taylor Carpenter watched her two daughters shout with glee on an inflatable bouncy house. Her eldest just started kindergarten at Bessie Rhodes in August, she said.
But, come June, her daughter’s time at the wall-to-wall two-way immersion school will come to a close.
Following several community protests to save the school in the spring of 2024, the Evanston/Skokie School District 65 School Board voted 5-2 to close the school after the 2025-26 school year. Just six months earlier, the district first voted to begin the closure process in a 4-2 vote in January 2024. The district resolution stated that the opening of the new Foster School in the 5th Ward and District 65’s financial constraints made operating Bessie Rhodes “unnecessary, unsuitable, and/or inconvenient.”
Last October, families protested again to keep the seventh and eighth grades open after the district announced their plans to close those classrooms in November of the same school year. The district then reversed its decision in early November, allowing the two grades to remain open under a modified staffing plan. For families who chose to stay at Bessie Rhodes, students are taught by various educators, including the principal and the volleyball coach.
Despite the uncertainty, families, like Carpenter’s, have tried to focus on the present.
Even though her daughter is just two months into the school year, Carpenter has already seen the impact of the school and its TWI program. Since school started in August, she said that her daughter has been conversing more with her grandmother, who exclusively speaks Spanish.
“I sneezed the other day, and she was like, ‘Salud!’” Carpenter said. “It’s actually been a lot, but it’s not overwhelming. She seems to be catching it all, grasping it all and it’s been really cool.”
Carpenter said she’s happy that she made this choice for her daughter, particularly because of the language component, even if it’s just for a year.
Assistant Principal Sarah Antrim-Graf said the school’s focus is on “the excitement of the year” and keeping things positive for students.
“What I’m mostly seeing from parents and students is that they’re all coming together. We know that this is reality. The closings are reality,” Antrim-Graf said. “But we also… just see people coming together to make it a really good last year.”
However, the school year has already seen instability. According to PTA Co-President and third grade parent Melissa Rosenzweig, the school experienced “last-minute losses of teachers,” including a “beloved” kindergarten teacher just before the school year started.
These disturbances have been especially concerning for parents, who still expect “a certain amount of stability and continuity” from the school environment, Rosenzweig said.
Eighth Ward resident David Salvador wanted a stable, long-term educational community for his second-grade daughter, making Bessie Rhodes’ then continuous K-8 structure appealing to him.
Salvador has been regularly reminding his daughter to accept that she will be going to the Foster School next year.
“We’re just trying to make it as easy as we can for them,” Salvador said. “Because I know if we were to say nothing and then, down the line, when it’s the end of the school year — tears, all that sadness.”
The Salvador’s have told their daughter to hang out with her friends and appreciate time with her teachers in this last year.
However, the community is now balancing that emotional preparation with new anxieties outside the classroom.
Recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the area has made some school events “difficult,” with priorities turning to keeping families safe, according to Rosenzweig.
With these considerations, Rosenzweig said, discussions about Bessie Rhodes’ closure have become something of a privilege. According to her, the question for some families is no longer where their kids will go to school next year, but whether it’s safe to drop them off in the morning.
Saturday’s Fall Fest was no exception. PTA Co-President Nancy Salvador — David Salvador’s wife — said the event is usually outdoors, but that it was held mostly indoors this year out of safety concerns due to crackdowns from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She added that this year’s event saw decreased attendance, as “not all families were comfortable coming out.”
Although these concerns weighed on attendees, they said they were still determined to hold onto the sense of community that has defined Bessie Rhodes.
For parent Heather Huddleston, that connection extends beyond the classroom, connecting parents as well. It’s rare to find that community as an adult — especially one shared with her children, she said.
Nancy Salvador added that the school’s multilingual resources allow Spanish-speaking families to overcome language barriers that may prevent them from fully engaging in their child’s education at a traditional public school.
Huddleston praised the teachers’ approach to this last year as being “a very positive thing to see.” Seeing that desire to continue teaching is very important for parents, she said. With two children in first and second grade, both of whom will go to the Foster School next year, she said that watching her children grow up in a diverse community was especially meaningful.
“They’re seeing these different cultures meld and where it comes from, and it’s just a beautiful thing that they will carry with them their entire life,” Huddleston said.
That diversity is what drew Huddleston and her family to Bessie Rhodes — and to Evanston.
However, Huddleston finds the current state of District 65 concerning, which makes moving to Evanston less enticing to families.
“If you don’t care about the schools, that’s just where things start to trickle and to fall apart, in my opinion, and make it less desirable overall,” Huddleston said.
A common frustration among parents is the district’s lack of communication throughout their decision-making process.
“I felt like their minds had been made up from the beginning that they were going to close the school, that they weren’t really listening to us,” Nancy Salvador said.
For parent Jo Ann Flores-Deter, the Bessie Rhodes closure has felt like a “tornado without a warning.”
Her eldest son was among the cohort of Bessie Rhodes eighth graders who transferred to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Literary and Fine Arts School mid-year in the wake of what Flores-Deter describes as the district’s “irresponsible” proposal to cut grade levels during the school year.
Now, she must prepare her kindergarten and fourth grade sons to make the same change.
District 65’s ongoing funding crisis makes preparing for the transition even more uncertain, Flores-Deter said.
Deter already knows which schools she would like to send her sons to next year. However, with schools slated to close during the 2026-2027 academic year, she doesn’t know which schools will be long-term options for her family.
Bessie Rhodes families have the option to continue their TWI education as a cohort at the new Foster School. Parents may also send their children to neighborhood or district magnet schools.
Rising sixth and eighth graders were only informed in March that the schools offering dual language immersion programs during the 2026-2027 school year would be Haven and Nichols Middle Schools.
In recent weeks, the district has seen families rallying to save their schools and the federal indictment of former Superintendent Devon Horton, raising more questions as to how the district has arrived at its current junction of turmoil.
“If all this money that just went away ended up putting this district in the red was under his watch, we should revisit having to close this school,” Salvador said.
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
Related Stories:
— District 65 School Board votes to close Dr. Bessie Rhodes School
—‘Uncharted waters’: Administrators, parents discuss plans for Foster School at forum
— District 65 to keep 7th, 8th grade Bessie Rhodes classrooms open for school year
