When Kingsley Elementary School students and teachers walked out of school for the last time Friday, they were met with thunderous applause.

The Evanston/Skokie School District 65 Board of Education voted unanimously in January to close Kingsley at the end of the 2025-26 school year as part of the district’s efforts to reduce its budget by $16 million to $18 million by fiscal year 2030. The clapout on the last day of school, organized by Kingsley’s parent-teacher association, was one of several initiatives to commemorate the school’s final weeks. 

As school community members laughed and cried, Kingsley parent Emily Chin called the scene “bittersweet.”

“We’ve had a lovely community here. I felt like we’ve made a lot of great friends,” Chin said. “We’ve known this was coming for a while, but now that it’s actually here, it feels a little bit, a little, a little hard to see.”

Teachers and staff were honored first before leading their students down the line. Afterward, families posed in front of a photo backdrop reading, “Once a Kingsley comet, always a comet!” 

Kingsley parent Patrick Jean-Jacques said the school represents the neighborhood as a whole. Jean-Jacques said that even as the Kingsley community faced “challenging times,” teachers and parents continued to prioritize students’ well-being.

He watched the clapout with his friend and fellow Kingsley parent Stephen Nitz. The two met when their children attended the Joseph E. Hill Early Childhood Center.

“The community remains. Stephen and I knew each other prior to Kingsley, and by chance, by proximity, everything like that, our kids were able to go to the same school,” Jean-Jacques said. “But we see each other in the community, and I think keeping that connection is going to be important.

The clapout also drew former Kingsley students and staff, many of whom stayed at the building long after the final class walked through the crowd. Newer community members stood alongside people who walked Kingsley’s halls when it reopened in 1991, and longtime Kingsley teachers reconnected with their now-grown former students.

Michelle Brand said she started out at Kingsley as a speech language pathologist in 2007 and later became an assistant principal at the school until 2023. Watching with a group of former staff, Brand said returning to Kingsley felt like coming home.

“The strength of this community will live on,” Brand said. “Just because the physical building isn’t here, it will never break the relationships that we’ve all made.”

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