After facing a gauntlet of interviews, questionnaires and meet and greets over the last two months from practically every corner of town, candidates running for the four open seats on the Evanston/Skokie District 65 school board answered questions Sunday afternoon from a key constituency — one that doesn’t get to vote but is the most directly affected by the board’s decisions.
That’s the city’s young people, who lived through remote learning early in the pandemic and who will deal with the consequences of future school closures.
Members of the city’s Youth Advisory Committee, which acts as a youth liaison to the city government and is mostly made up of teens who attend Evanston Township High School after years in District 65 schools, interviewed nine of the 12 candidates in front of a live audience at the Fleetwood-Jourdain Community Center. (Brandon Utter, Heather Vezner and Randy Steckman couldn’t make it.)
Their questions primarily focused on experience, familiarity with the district, the budget crisis and accountability. Committee members asked every candidate about past work with multimillion dollar budgets and if they had attended board meetings in the past or given public comments.
While every candidate said they had been to a number of recent board meetings or at least watched most of them online, the budget experience question ran the gamut of responses, from some who have no experience working with large budgets to others who actively oversee $50 million budgets and thousands of employees in their professional lives.
More than 50 community members showed up for the event, where several candidates joked that they were more nervous to field questions from youth than they’ve been at any other forum.
Below is an excerpt from each candidate’s answers, in order of their appearance. The next opportunity to hear from them is at 6 p.m. Wednesday on Zoom, at a virtual candidate forum sponsored by Evanston CASE (Community, Advocacy, Support and Education for families living with disabilities).
Andrew Wymer
“I want this new board to put to rest the structural deficits. My specific goal is that the word ‘structural deficits’ will not be used in relationship to D65 for the next 20 years. We have to deal with this, because money, the way we handle the finances has impacts on all of our kids, especially those who are most marginalized. Part of how we’re going to do that is we’re going to have a strategic plan, and we need a new one — a more detailed one, a clear one — that’s going to guide us.”
Maria Opdycke
“My leadership and finance experience is very applicable to the situation the district is in today. When I look at the budget, and I understand that we’re living beyond our means in a pretty sizable way, one of the things that I’d like to see us do is to begin a bottoms-up budgeting process with every school, and keep the students at the center of that, and allow the principals to really define, based on the parameters that we’ve set, class sizes and those kinds of things. How do we allocate resources to ensure that student needs are met?”
Daniel Lyonsmith
“To me, the way our board does the public comment is kind of to put it off to the side. It’s not as meaningful — the board doesn’t react or respond to any public comment. It’s something they have to do because of the Open Meetings Act regulations, so they do it, but it definitely doesn’t lead to community dialogue. It does allow for people to make some statements. If they know what’s coming up at the board meeting, they can address it. But sometimes, it’s been very disappointing that the board didn’t take the opportunity to respond to very poignant public comments, because sometimes people make some very heartfelt or well-researched comments in those meetings.”
Chris Van Nostrand
“We’ve focused quite a bit up until this point on expense reduction, and I think it’s also important to be thinking about revenue creation, as well. When we’re thinking about creating a sustainable budget, it’s not just, ‘What can we cut?’ It’s also, ‘What sources of funding do we have available to us?’ That might be public funding in the form of referendums. It might be private funding in the form of fundraising. It may be grants. So there are pools of revenue out there that we can use to create a more sustainable budget. What’s important when we do that, is we have to have a really clear, compelling vision for D65. We have to explain what we stand for, what kind of education we want to provide, and then go out and get the funds to actually support those priorities.”
Lionel Gentle
“I will be a voice for the voiceless, because I am doing it already, and I look forward to speaking for the many students who don’t have a voice. I’ve said it before — when we think of District 65, we think of Chute, Nichols, Lincolnwood, Haven. But we don’t necessarily think of — I don’t want to call them lower divisions, but we treat them as such — JEH, Park, Rice. Rarely do we mention those schools, and those schools need just as much help as our quote-unquote ‘Division 1’ schools.”
Nichole Pinkard
“One of the clear issues where there seems to be a lack of accountability is board members and their accountability to the PTAs and the schools that they’re responsible for. And I don’t think there’s any visibility in terms of board members connected and showing up. So how do we make that visible? We all know grades and reports and things like that make you attend to things you might not attend to. Second, I think anything we choose to do as a policy, we should have a set of triggers, or ways to say, ‘We believe this policy is going to lead to this outcome.’ … If you check back in a year, if they’re in green, let’s keep going. If they’re in yellow, we need to bring them back to the conversation and talk about them. The problem is if we’re only talking about things when they get into the red.”
Christopher DeNardo
“As much as I dislike being in a financially fragile position, I like having that position leveraged over us [by the Trump administration potentially] even less. I think it’s framing things from a position of weakness, instead of really looking at the district financially from the ground up. District 65 is not a poorly funded district. … We’re not so exposed and fragile, and I certainly would not want to get money by caving to the Trump administration. … Count that [federal] money as not there, do everything we can do without it, and then, working as a board, try to find that remaining $6 or $7 million that is important, coming from the federal government. I believe it’s all apportioned to the most at risk or at need students, but the the money is within the community, and I think the strength and resiliency is there, as well.”
Peter Bogira
“In my professional experience, and even personally as an adult, one thing I’ve really sharpened a lot in terms of my skill set is the ability to listen to people really effectively, understand people’s perspectives, disagree in a healthy way and recognize the things that I know and that I don’t. When I think about how that leads to being an effective board member, it’s not just with those six other colleagues up there, it’s really how you act as a sponge for the community. Because essentially, the board is intended to be reflective of the community, the visions and the values, and if you don’t listen — and I think in recent years, there’s been a little bit of a lack of that — then you’re kind of missing it. You’re not just elected once, and then you just assume that you know best with everything. You really need to have that ongoing thirst for an understanding that you’re in lockstep with the community.”
Patricia Anderson
“My overall goal for District 65 is to regain its standing as a pillar of the community and to make sure that we offer the best that we can offer for our students within the budgetary guidelines that we’re going to have to follow. Three parts of that are: Make sure that the Foster School that is built is more than a building, and is a source of benefit to the community. Another long-term goal is to make District 65 a place that teachers will want to seek to be a part of, because that’s another piece of the problem. We really need to work on retaining and attracting the best talent. Another goal, especially in light of what’s happening nationally, is to make this a safe place for everybody to learn. I want it to be an inclusive and welcoming environment.”
Evanston youth leaders question District 65 board hopefuls is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.