All nine District 65 school board candidates who appeared at Wednesday night’s virtual forum hosted by Evanston CASE (Community, Advocacy, Support and Education) — a nonprofit that supports kids with disabilities — criticized what they described as a lack of sufficient staffing and services for students who receive accommodations through an individualized education program (IEP) or a 504 plan.
CASE’s Annie Joseph asked five questions which each candidate had 90 seconds to answer. Maria Opdycke, Heather Vezner and Randy Steckman weren’t able to participate, but CASE plans to post their written statements to the CASE website and/or Facebook page. About 50 people tuned in to the Zoom webinar.
The most pointed moments of the night came in response to a question addressing District 65 and Superintendent Angel Turner’s emails about budget shortfalls referring to overruns in transportation and special education as the reason for the problem.
“I found that statement very troublesome, for the superintendent to specifically identify a group of students and say that the problems with the budget could be directly related to providing service for them,” said Patricia Anderson. “The district’s special education services department does not have a continuum of services, so they [students] do receive private placements.”
Anderson’s comment, repeated by many, represented the forum’s theme, which was that the district doesn’t have enough people or programs to teach the students with the highest needs in-house. Instead, District 65 spends a significant amount of money on private and therapeutic day school tuitions as well as the transportation needed to get to those schools to comply with its legal obligation to meet the needs of students with disabilities.
Several candidates also mentioned that the families they speak to really want to send their kids to a neighborhood school here, and they’re still unhappy with the situation despite the private outplacements.
Here’s a selection of comments the candidates made:
- Chris Van Nostrand: “To be clear, the budget crisis was caused by a combination of financial illiteracy and malfeasance, so it makes absolutely no sense to blame a particular student population.”
- Daniel Lyonsmith: “The big problem is that these services or extra supports may be expensive, but we’re also getting a really bad product. We’re spending a lot of money, and we’re also not serving kids well. Parents and kids aren’t happy with the services they’re getting.”
- Lionel Gentle: “I believe it’s a product of poor planning, like many of the issues we are in as a district. We have to have open discussions so that we can all come up with a solution that will benefit the students who are being harmed the most.”
- Brandon Utter: “The district is now paying more money for the same services that for some may have been suboptimal.”
- Peter Bogira: “I try to give Dr. Turner the benefit of the doubt in her intent, and I think it was just a bad framing of what really should have sounded more like, ‘We’ve seen escalating costs due to our district not adequately providing that continuum of services needed, and that leads to that increased need for outplacement, and that’s on us.'”
Most candidates who have a child who needs services (or have friends in that situation) said there are long wait times to even get kids evaluated, while some kids don’t get the help they need because they’ve learned coping mechanisms or have good grades. Others said that Black students in particular are overdiagnosed, and there’s a history of people wrongly assuming that early behavioral issues are intellectual disabilities.
Anderson and Nichole Pinkard also stressed the need for more data on diagnoses and the specific outcomes of students using different programs.
Addressing a question about solutions moving forward, here’s what some had to say:
- Pinkard: “How do we develop a dashboard that can allow the whole community — not just the parents who have kids who are receiving services, but all of us — to understand how we’re providing services? … If we can visualize them, it will make it easier for the board and the whole community to live up to what it is that we’re supposed to do for our children.”
- Andrew Wymer: “We need to ensure that engagement of students with disabilities is not performative, it’s not misrepresented. We need to press the superintendent and the administration to keep students with disabilities at the top of their mind when we’re making financial decisions, curricular decisions, policy decisions, any decisions.”
- Christopher DeNardo: “I think it’s going to have to be down to a real sense of collective accountability, as opposed to, ‘How can I get these services?’ Getting parents, caregivers to become active participants, helping students who receive those services to become active participants and giving teachers and the administration the resources they need to … implement these things with fidelity.”
The 12 candidates in the field are competing for four open seats on the school board. Early voting begins 9 a.m. Monday at the Morton Civic Center, 2100 Ridge Ave., and continues through March 31. Election Day is Tuesday, April 1.
Nine candidates take aim at District 65’s shortcomings for students with disabilities is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.