Evanston/Skokie School District 65 has seen a 20.5% drop in student enrollment over the past five years, the highest among a cohort of 13 other similar Cook County districts; and by a significant amount, the district had the lowest student-to-administrator ratio among that same cohort, at 93-to-1, according to an investigation by the RoundTable published in March and based on the Illinois State Board of Education’s (ISBE) “Illinois Report Card” data from the end of the 2022-2023 school year.
In late July, Superintendent Angel Turner announced that the district had ended the 2024 fiscal year with an unforeseen $10 million budget deficit after the district already had planned to reduce overall staff by 40 positions, keep vacant any non-essential positions, freeze non-essential purchased services, end the CREATE 65 teacher residency program and begin talks on closing other schools besides the K-8 Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies as part of an overall consolidation and student reassignment plan.
As reported in the RoundTable’s March investigation, Hannah Schmid, policy analyst at the Illinois Policy Institute, suggested that District 65 and other districts that have lost a high percentage of students should investigate why. Among other questions Schmid encouraged Evanston to think about: To what extent is the decline simply due to natural population decreases, and what’s the role of families consciously choosing either to switch to private schools or move to other districts?
“What can we do to make the public school a better option for these families, if families are choosing other options?” she said, wondering out loud if District 65 could work to reverse its declines. “Especially in a place like District 65 that’s facing dire financial choices. … You never want to see a district have to make big cuts to right-size that staff, adjusting to enrollment. How do we attract students who are leaving?”
In that earlier story, District 65 school board President Sergio Hernandez and board Finance Chair Joey Hailpern speculated as to why families might have chosen to leave, including such reasons as the district’s pandemic policies and families’ overall impression of the quality of the schools, in addition to the rising cost of living in Evanston.
“A lot of the districts have had a decline; we’ve had a steep decline,” Hailpern said. “One of the things we need to improve is the way people feel about their public schools. There’s definitely a debate about that that exists, that I think we have to own and be real about.”
Recruiting families back?
In that earlier article, Hernandez claimed the district was undertaking an initiative of the sort that Schmid had recommended: “For the past couple of years, [the district] has been actively reaching out to families who may have transferred their children out to private schools during the pandemic, as a result of the pandemic and our pandemic policies,” he said. “We’ve been taking an active role in trying to start recruiting back the families who have left us.”
However, it appears that such an effort remains more of an aspirational concept.
“The reality is that we have quite a bit of transition on our team right now, which includes our student assignment and registration team,” District 65 communications chief Melissa Messinger wrote in an emailed response to questions this summer. “We care very much about better understanding why people come and go and also about being a district where parents feel confident about sending their children. This is definitely a focus of this current administration.”
Messinger added that these efforts will be refocused with the new team and central office structure that went into effect on July 1, as Turner became permanent superintendent this spring after spending most of the year as an interim.
“It’s going to take some time to gather meaningful data on this, rather than offering anecdotes. I ask that you please stay tuned as we engage in this work in the coming year,” she wrote. “It is our desire to build in some systems where we can better track entry and exit into the district and gain some more quantitative data. Additionally, my team is working on enhancing our marketing and outreach efforts.”
Contacted earlier this summer, Hailpern said he was not aware of any such efforts to date. “I think it’s a great idea for us to embark on. We could learn from it,” he said. “I don’t know of any system we have in place right now to reach out to families who have left to inquire about them returning, wanting to return or to understand why they left.”
Hailpern added that the logistics could be challenging. “The work itself to do that would be very complicated, because you have to know where people are, and you have to know how to access them,” he said. “It would be very valuable work.”
Two of the “comp” districts included in the RoundTable’s article in March, Oak Park Elementary School District 97 and Evergreen Park District 124, which lost 10.9% and 8.3% of students in the same five-year period, said they had not undertaken such an initiative to date, either.
Reasons for leaving
Angelique Ketzback, who withdrew her youngest child after third grade at Washington Elementary when she realized school wouldn’t reopen in fall 2020, said she never received any follow-up communication from the district about that decision – or about her own resignation after nearly seven years as a special education paraprofessional at Washington and Dewey elementary schools.
“We were never asked why we left – no email, no letter, no call from the school or district,” she said, adding that the only response she got to her resignation notice detailed how to hand in her badge and computer and wishing her luck in the future. “There was no follow-up to withdrawing our youngest and for my resignation. From talking to other employees and parents who left, there was also none with them.”
Barry Doyle, the parent of a freshman at Evanston Township High School and a seventh grader at Haven Middle School, considered moving his older child to St. Athanasius School in Evanston when she was entering seventh grade in 2022, but he found out that the waitlist for incoming seventh graders had 13 names on it already. He believes District 65 should delve into why so many families have left.
“It absolutely should be done,” he said. “People have been leaving District 65 for any number of reasons. Nobody seems to have any interest as to why they’re leaving. The net result is that whatever is going on in District 65 seems to be the best marketing campaign for private schools in the area. … People who have been gone for a while probably are not coming back. But watching as many families leave the district as they have, you would like to learn from the mistakes that were made. Some families, I’m sure, just got sick of keeping their kids home during the pandemic. But there are plenty of other reasons.”
Doyle also took issue with the notion that, against the backdrop of mounting budget deficits, the enrollment losses present a “financial opportunity” to close one or more schools. Robert Grossi, a consultant for the district who is working with Chief Financial Officer Tamara Mitchell on making budget cuts this year, has used that language multiple times at recent board meetings.
“There are communities that are built up around a school. There are teachers and staff people who depend on those schools for their livelihood. The idea that closing a neighborhood school to deal with these kinds of financial issues is an opportunity, strikes me as ghoulish,” he said. “There really needs to be true, authentic dialogue with the community. It’s something that is way, way, way too important to squeeze people out, when people made major life decisions about buying houses in Evanston, and which school their kids are going to attend.”
Board member Omar Salem said he would support something like a simple exit survey to families who are leaving after each year to find out why, and what it might take to win them back. “It came up a lot during the campaign,” he said. “I did talk to many parents who reached out to me, who have left the district and shared a bunch of different reasons why. I always want to talk to parents and hear why they’ve left. If we have an exit survey, that’s fine. That’s not a ton of money.”
But Salem added that he would not be in favor of a more extensive effort to try to win back families who have left over the last several years. “Would I ever want to do a deep dive and hire tons of consultants? Of course not,” he said. “I think that would be a terrible use of resources.”
During his 2023 campaign and since then, Salem has heard a lot of anecdotal reasons for families departing. “I’ve had people stop me at Valli,” he said. “There are some themes I have noticed. But there were a lot of folks who gave [individual] reasons I did not expect.”
To convince families to return to District 65, Salem said he believes the board and district need to build back trust lost in recent years.
“To me, it’s like, if we build it, they will come,” he said. “If we can do things right, serve our kids properly, we can build back our enrollment. People will come back to the public schools. I don’t think we need to, quote-unquote, ‘cater’ to anyone who has left. If we do the right thing, that should go hand-in-hand. … There’s a lot of mistrust, even from people who like the district and supported the previous administration.”
He added that he hopes the district’s recent acknowledgments of its challenges will begin that rebuilding process.
Ultimately, Salem believes a simple opt-in survey of families who have left could be useful, and he thinks that those families would be motivated to respond to express why they did so. “If we were to do that, and we do notice some [patterns], that might trigger a deeper dive,” he said. “This is one of those places where data could help us. Are there trends in certain neighborhoods, demographics, families of students with IEPs? If we notice that they’re mostly one-offs, personal situations, that’s not a large financial endeavor so far.”
Winning back families wouldn’t impact the district’s bottom line that significantly, Salem said, since the state or federal funding tied to enrollment is relatively modest. “But just thinking holistically, it’s important to have quality public schools,” he said. “It’s the sign of a thriving community. We don’t want people to be unhappy.”
A recent analysis in the FOIA Gras e-newsletter produced by Evanston resident Tom Hayden noted that the enrollment decline has impacted the district’s budget in at least one noticeable way: the per-capita rate paid for students with IEPs for whom the district pays therapeutic day school tuition, which has roughly doubled to $23,137.45 over the past eight school years, due in significant measure to the enrollment decline.
“The per cap has been going up like crazy because the denominator [total enrollment] has been going down so fast,” Hayden wrote in an email to the Roundtable.
The number of students with IEPs has risen 10% to 1,142 over that period of time. That means 19% of District 65 students need specialized services, as opposed to the state average of 15%. According to state law and ISBE guidance, the district has to cover double its per-capita tuition for students who need to receive services at other schools, and the state reimburses the rest. Instead of paying around $25,000 per student a decade ago, District 65 is now on the hook for more than $45,000.
While the district’s reporting makes it unclear how many students are outplaced into private school, Hayden estimated that about 100 (between 8% and 9%) of the 1,142 fall into that category, which lines up with the total expense involved of $5 million.
In FOIA Gras, Hayden said that as former Superintendent Devon Horton left the district last year, he seemed to imply that since most funding comes from local revenue, it didn’t matter financially if families left. “If you want to take your child out because you want some focus on your child then by all means go to a private school,” Horton said in an exit interview.
In an August email to the community, Turner pledged a stepped-up focus on improving the district’s ways of doing business.
“From my perspective and also what I have seen since beginning here, what we are missing in D65 is systems, structures, and processes – particularly at the district level,” she wrote. “This is what will allow us to best serve our community and ultimately be more efficient and cost effective. I am committed to working to ensure that we have clearly defined processes, well-articulated expectations, connection to resources, efficiencies that maximize productivity, and, most importantly, that we can say with confidence that the work that we are doing is having a positive impact on every child.”
Hernandez could not be reached for further comment.
District 65 efforts to lure back former students still TBD is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.