Shorefront Legacy Center hosted a screening of the film “Stolen School” at Northwestern, followed by a panel discussion with filmmakers and speakers in the project Monday.

The film, released in 2024, examines the history and impacts of Foster School’s 1967 closure on the Black community in Evanston. 

It explained how the city’s redlining policies led to disproportionate concentration of Black residents in the 5th Ward. The ward’s neighborhood school, Foster School, became an all-Black school by the 1930s. Throughout the film, former students of the school recollected how the school lacked educational resources and safe infrastructure compared to other schools in Evanston.    

Producer Laurice Bell organized the event and moderated the talkback. 

“We’ve had a few screenings before,” Bell said. “One of the things that often happens is that it inspires people to share their own stories.”

Foster School was closed in 1967, scattering the students to different schools farther away on a bus. However, what was meant to be a solution to desegregation had an adverse effect, according to the film. Roughly 25 businesses closed in the vicinity of the school, and children were exposed to racially-charged bullying at their new schools.    

The vacated school building was taken over by the nonprofit organization Family Focus from 1987 to 2019, where the organization provided support services to families in the 5th Ward.

Terri Shepard is one of the 20 people featured in the film. She initially got involved with the project after sharing her research on Foster School and the 5th Ward with the film’s executive producer and Black studies Prof. kihana miraya ross.

“(ross) interviewed me, as well as many people at Evanston, about our experiences with our schools,” Shepard said. “I’m not from here, so I gave my Topeka, Kansas iteration.”

Community members continued to advocate for the reopening of Foster School by trying to pass a referendum in 2012. The film, however, explored how their efforts were unsuccessful, partly because schools outside of the 5th Ward have benefited from the diversity.

In 2022, the District 65 school board unanimously voted to reestablish a K-8 school in the 5th Ward. The school board later downsized the school to K-5 for budgetary reasons. The new school is named Foster School in honor of its predecessor. The new Foster School is set to open before the 2026-27 school year. 

Dino Robinson is the founder of Shorefront Legacy Center and one of the filmmakers of the film. During the panel discussion, he emphasized the importance of “building relationship and trust” with the community in the filmmaking process by ensuring that “we have voices that came from that school.”An important part of this was avoiding stock images, he said. 

“Any shot that we have has to be based here in Evanston,” Robinson said. “Because if we put something else in there that’s foreign, it’s going to be discredited in this community, and if we lose the community on that, we lose everything else.”

While the film specifically focused on Foster School’s history, Bell, Robinson and Shepard expressed the film’s message of reflecting and repairing historical injustice, transcending beyond the boundaries of Evanston. 

“Do other people need to see it? Of course,” Shepard said. “Should it be a national thing? I think it should be a national thing.”

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