At Monday’s Evanston/Skokie District 65 school board meeting, the public got its first high-level view of what the next year and a half of budget cuts and school closures could look like.
Susan Harkin and Gregg Fuerstenau of consulting firm Student-Centered Services, which signed a deal with District 65 last week to create a plan for budget cuts, presented an early timeline for the process as well as some target numbers for reductions in different parts of the budget. Fuerstenau is a superintendent in downstate Litchfield and Harkin is a former superintendent at District 300 in Algonquin, Illinois.
In collaboration with the district administration and school board, the two are leading an effort to cut the District 65 budget for the 2026 fiscal year — which starts on July 1, 2025 — by $13.2 million.
In their presentation to the board on Monday, Harkin and Fuerstenau said their goal is to “provide reductions for FY26 that will minimize impact to our students, minimize impact to staff that directly support students, minimize racial inequities, focus on the key areas identified by the administration and approved by the board and avoid short-term borrowing.”
The journey toward meeting that goal began Monday night when Superintendent Angel Turner and other administrators held a community “Listen & Learn” session on the reduction plan (scroll down to the next section for more info on that). After a series of engagement meetings before winter break, Harkin and Fuerstenau are scheduled to present three to five options for the $13.2 million in cuts at a board meeting on Jan. 13. The board will then vote on its chosen option two weeks later, on Jan. 27.
A broad overview of where those cuts may come is in the table below from Student-Centered Services’ presentation. Right now, they’re looking at well over half the reductions coming from staff cuts. The levels in the table describe the extent of the potential impact on students, staff and racial equity, where a Level 1 impact is minimal, Level 2 is moderate and Level 3 is high. A Level 1 impact for staff means only cutting “positions that do not directly support students and are not located in schools,” with a Level 2 being “positions that directly support adults in schools” and Level 3 “positions that directly support students in schools.”
“It’s going to be very difficult for us to not get at staffing,” which accounts for 70% of all district expenses, said Harkin, who later added that “if we do nothing, we really are going to compromise the education system for this school district.”
Reacting to Harkin’s point about the necessity of cutting staff given the portion of the budget that goes to salaries and benefits, board member Biz Lindsay-Ryan thanked her for defining different buckets of staff to consider because “there is nobody that works for this district that is not important and critical in students’ lives. … Everybody impacts students. Some have more direct impact than others. Some are in buildings. Some are not in buildings,” she said.
“It’s going to be a painful process to reduce staff, and I don’t want any of our staff to think that we don’t think the work they do is incredibly important.”
Worst case scenario
Tamara Mitchell, District 65’s chief financial officer, also presented the two slides below to show what would happen to the district’s financial situation if the status quo were to continue. Mitchell’s projections show $16.8 million and 32 days’ worth of cash on hand in the 2026 fiscal year. The orange line in the “Days Cash on Hand” graph represents the school board’s internal policy of maintaining at least 90 days of cash at all times, and the green line shows the point at which the district would need to take out short-term loans to pay the bills. Loans are not needed this year, Mitchell said.
“If we took no further action to reduce expenditures, the district would effectively be out of money in FY27,” she said.
Going forward beyond January’s meetings, Harkin and Fuerstenau said they’ll move to assessing the district’s buildings in February and March in order to develop “school consolidation proposals,” meaning suggestions for possible school closures, in April. Those proposals will then be revised over the summer of 2025 based on community and board input. Any actual closures would go into effect after the 2025-26 school year.
In the meantime, the District 65 communications team has put together this web page with an overview of everything related to the deficit reduction plan.
What matters to families
Later on Monday evening, a few dozen parents and caregivers gathered in the Chute Middle School cafeteria for the first public community meeting where residents could provide input on the coming budget cuts.
During an introductory presentation, Turner covered some of the basic facts surrounding the district’s financial issues and what needs to happen to fix the situation. In a video, she also directly addressed questions about funding for the construction of Foster School and whether pausing that project would solve part of the problem.
“We see Foster School as a vital investment in our community and our future. We know some believe canceling the Foster School project could save money, but we’ve already invested significantly, and construction is well underway,” she said in the video, which is posted on YouTube. “It [canceling] won’t solve what’s truly needed — eliminating our structural deficit.”
During the meeting, Turner said the $40 million in proceeds from the sale of lease certificates being used to finance the new school cannot go toward anything other than new construction, so the district cannot simply move that money elsewhere.
Attendees spent the bulk of the meeting, though, responding to the following two questions posed by Turner and her team:
- As difficult decisions lie ahead to balance the budget, what are the top three priorities that must be protected?
- What programs or services are most essential to maintain the quality of students’ education?
Most of the audience agreed that academic excellence, rigor, high-quality teachers, teacher retention, equitable access to services/programs, walkable neighborhood schools and transparency from district leaders “must be protected.” As for the most important programs, attendees mentioned special education services, two-way immersion (TWI) classes in Spanish and English, African Centered Curriculum, fine arts, physical education and libraries.
All responses that different groups came up with are shown in the pictures below. People could place sticky dots next to points they agreed with.
One parent, Seth Weinert, urged the district to exercise caution when considering school closures in particular.
“Let’s be very cautious about decisions that have permanence attached to them, that are irreversible. … If you’re permanently disposing of an asset, like a school, it’s much harder to change that, so just approach it with extreme caution,” Weinert said.
“There are things that provide one-time hits like the sale of a building — nice cash infusion — and then there are things that do stuff for you every year. So we should be really thinking carefully about what’s going to give us a one-time hit that’s had a permanent impact, versus things that are going to be more sustainable and help us every year.”
The remaining two public feedback meetings are scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 12, at Nichols Middle School, 800 Greenleaf St., and 9:30 a.m. Monday, Dec. 16 at Fleetwood-Jourdain Community Center, 1655 Foster St.
District 65 begins journey toward budget cuts, school closures is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.