Families try again to save Bessie Rhodes, but District 65 stands firm

For one last time, dozens of students, parents and community members pleaded with the Evanston/Skokie District 65 school board Monday night to keep the Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies open.

More than 100 protesters again marched from the K-8 magnet school in Skokie to the district’s headquarters at 1500 McDaniel Ave. for the third and final public hearing on closing Bessie Rhodes after the 2025-26 school year.

And for the third time in less than two months, they sang, danced and ate tamales together outside the school board room before the meeting began. They donned green T-shirts featuring the Rhodes rocket mascot and chanted “Save Bessie Rhodes.”

At the previous two hearings, attendees questioned the district’s decision making, pointing out that Bessie Rhodes is not the most expensive school to operate, nor does it have the highest percentage of students from the Fifth Ward, where a new school is headed. It also has the highest percentage of students of color, low-income students and English learners of any school in the district.

“Your words do not match the data, and your actions are concerning,” said Rebecca Garcia Sosa, a Bessie Rhodes parent and native Spanish speaker. “The Fifth Ward school back in the day was dismantled to desegregate Black children, with hopes to integrate and provide better care and education to all. Well, that did not go as expected. How is dismantling the only school where no one feels othered and diversity is celebrated different?”

Foster School cited

Time and again Monday night, parents invoked the Foster School closure in the late 1960s that Garcia Sosa mentioned, saying they feared that closing the district’s only wall-to-wall bilingual school could become another historic injustice against a marginalized community in Evanston.

At the crux of the debate over the future of Bessie Rhodes is the district’s approach to dual-language education in English and Spanish. In 2017 the board decided to gradually convert Bessie Rhodes into an all-bilingual school, and the current fifth graders will become the first class of dual language sixth graders in District 65 come this fall.

In the years since that decision, the Spanish-speaking population at Rhodes has steadily risen, with parents even reporting Monday night that they specifically moved to Evanston in the hope of eventually sending their kids to school there. Several speakers even quoted comments that board members and administrators made at that 2017 vote, where Sergio Hernandez, now the board president, called wall-to-wall two-way language immersion “the future,” according to parent Aidé Acosta.

“Bessie Rhodes is a success story for your district. A lot of districts around the country would kill for a school like Bessie Rhodes, a community like Bessie Rhodes, to have a place like Bessie Rhodes where people coming to the community could go and have that option, and feel great about it,” said Gable Tyler, a parent of a first grader. “So it’s crazy to me to have you guys sitting here talking about closing it. Please don’t do that.”

‘We have taken this seriously’

Before the public comment part of the hearing, Superintendent Angel Turner reiterated her administration’s support for closing the Rhodes building and addressed how families have criticized the decision.

“Despite what it may feel like at the moment, Bessie Rhodes is not being singled out,” Turner said. “This is simply the first of several tough decisions that lie ahead as it relates to school consolidation in District 65.”

She went on to describe Rhodes as “the most underutilized building in the district” with significant repair needs. Even though it’s the most diverse school in District 65, “our decisions are with equity in mind,” Turner said, as the board has voted to return a neighborhood school to the Fifth Ward.

She also referenced the original K-8 Fifth Ward school plan, which included keeping the Rhodes community together under one roof in the new building as “a school within a school.” Most families were on board with that proposal because, crucially, it would have kept a wall-to-wall K-8 bilingual school in District 65.

But, after Turner revealed in October that the initial design would have cost $65 million – $25 million over budget – the board shifted to planning a smaller and less-expensive K-5 school instead. That left Rhodes on the chopping block with nowhere else to go.

“We have taken this seriously,” said board member Mya Wilkins. “I’m sure it will not help today, but if I thought that the only way for Bessie Rhodes students to have a place where they would feel a sense of belonging, where they would have a multicultural environment, where they would get an education that they deserve, was to keep the building open, I would be making very different decisions today. But I do not believe that is true.”

Several other board members echoed Wilkins and said they do not agree children of color will be “othered” at other schools. Hernandez and Biz Lindsay-Ryan again emphasized their belief in focusing on walkable schools for everyone over a magnet school for some, referring to a survey of families done several years ago at the beginning of the redistricting process – officially called the Student Assignment Plan – which is still ongoing.

But Omar Salem, another board member, proposed keeping Rhodes open through 2027 instead to give the district more time for a thoughtful transition, and to allow the students in the first cohort of wall-to-wall dual language to finish middle school at Rhodes. Under the proposed timeline, they’ll move to Haven Middle School for eighth grade.

Salem’s colleagues on the board said they would consider any and all ideas depending on feedback from district staff, but that the cost of keeping Rhodes open for an extra year might prove too much.

“My fear is that if we continue to delay, things are just going to get a lot hairier, in regard to what we do around student enrollments and the staffing,” said Hernandez. “That’s at the core of our expenses, is the staffing piece. We’ve tried. We’ve tried as a school district to really try to engage community members in all our decisions. That’s something that we value.”

‘The Latino voice just doesn’t really matter’

After speaking with families organizing to save Bessie Rhodes, Skokie Mayor George Van Dusen and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) even sent letters to the school board supporting the Rhodes community.

Board member Joey Hailpern, who said he still believes closing Bessie Rhodes is likely the necessary first step in cutting costs and shutting down what will eventually be multiple schools, mentioned having a productive call with the ACTFL executive director after receiving her note. He said he explained to her the district’s vision for having all walkable neighborhood schools, with dual language programs continuing through middle school.

“The main thing was that people don’t understand where we’re going,” Hailpern said. “We heard from people that we need a unified message across departments and board members and Bessie Rhodes administration, that there’s a lack of clarity in the answers parents are getting. … We have two years before the building closes. We have to do something over the next two years, actively, to care for members of our community.”

The district has to make a big effort to restore trust with Bessie Rhodes families, according to Hailpern, because it’s “clearly broken” at this point.

That broken trust was apparent as person after person stood up Monday night in the board room to say they didn’t feel heard and couldn’t understand the decisions being made.

“Not only are you closing a school, but you’re also shutting down an entire community, and I think the biggest loss in all of this is the trust that you’re losing from our multicultural, bilingual aspiring community that you made a promise to, that we made a promise to, in 2017,” said Rebeca Mendoza, who was a board member at the time. “This decision shows me, like countless other decisions that are made in this city, that the Latino voice just doesn’t really matter, and that you don’t listen to us.”

Taking an informal straw poll, six of the seven board members endorsed bringing a resolution forward to close Bessie Rhodes at their June 10 meeting. Salem’s was the only dissenting opinion.

Editor’s note: This story has updated to correct the spelling of Mya Wilkins’ first name.

Families try again to save Bessie Rhodes, but District 65 stands firm is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.