District 65 school board votes to close Bessie Rhodes

Tension quickly turned into tears Monday night at the Joseph E. Hill Early Childhood Center.

There, at Evanston/Skokie School District 65 headquarters, the school board voted 5-2 to close the Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies – the district’s only entirely bilingual school, and its most diverse racially and socioeconomically.

Before the vote, for the fourth time this spring, parents and students donned green shirts with the phrase “Yo soy Dr. Bessie Rhodes.” They held signs begging the district to “save Bessie Rhodes,” and they ate tamales together on the grass outside the school board room one last time.

Inside the board room, Rhodes supporters read a letter in Spanish, then in English, from the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights urging the board to postpone the vote to first conduct an independent racial equity impact assessment on the school closure. And they voiced their displeasure openly when they disagreed with responses from board members.

And then the vote happened.

Kids hugged their parents with tears streaming down their faces. “After all that effort, they’re still shutting it down,” one student said to his dad. “You’re happy making children cry,” another parent said to the board.

“When was the last time that you’ve seen children beg you to keep their school open?” asked father Lionel Gentle. “I don’t think that’s ever happened. But I’ll tell you what. There’s always a rainbow after the rain. People vote.”

The scene outside the entrance was fit for a funeral. But despite mourning the loss of their school, families made one thing clear.

“Sigue la lucha,” said parent and rally organizer Peter Schenck. “The fight continues.”

In reading from the lawyers’ committee’s letter, several parents referred to its 2018 success in stopping the closure of National Teachers Academy, an elementary school in Chicago, through litigation. In that case, Black families from the elementary school sued Chicago Public Schools for violating the Civil Rights Act and Illinois School Code in the procedures it followed for closing the school. They won a preliminary injunction from a Cook County Circuit Court judge, and CPS dropped its closure plan.

Bessie Rhodes parents told the RoundTable they’re in active conversations with the lawyers’ committee and other organizations, like the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, about putting together a formal case.

“The [Chicago Lawyers’ Committee] letter affirms every single point Bessie Rhodes parents have been making for the last nine months, but up until now has been ignored by District 65 leadership,” said parent Aidé Acosta. “You have underestimated us. The partnership with CLC is the beginning of our strategic collective efforts being led by parents of color. We will continue to be relentless in pursuing all of our options, and we are prepared to see this through.”

Board members have repeatedly stressed that closing Bessie Rhodes is the first step in a long process of district cost-cutting measures that will likely include the closure of other schools.

But Schenck pointed out Monday that National Teachers Academy families won a court injunction six years ago partially because some NTA students previously attended schools that had been shuttered. District 65 conducting its “consolidation” plan piece by piece, instead of planning it out fully ahead of time, he argued, could lead to a similar situation, with students being relocated to a new school that is subsequently closed.

‘Closing a physical building’

Reiterating what he’s said previously, school board President Sergio Hernandez emphasized his view that Monday’s vote was just about “closing a physical building,” not ending any programs.

Families clearly disagreed, stressing that Bessie Rhodes is the only “wall-to-wall” bilingual school in the district, where every student – both native Spanish speakers and native English speakers – learns both languages in a building staffed by bilingual educators. Closing Rhodes effectively ends the wall-to-wall dual language model, which they called the “gold standard” of language education, in Evanston.

Most board members have different priorities, though. Hernandez, Soo La Kim and board Vice President Mya Wilkins, who all voted to close Rhodes, said walkable neighborhood schools for all students is their main goal for the future. Dual language classes at every school, and expanding dual language to all middle schools, also better serves the entire community than one wall-to-wall bilingual school, according to Hernandez.

Kim described the fates of Bessie Rhodes and the new Fifth Ward school – a $48.4 million, two-story K-5 building that the district is set to begin construction on next month at Foster Field – as “deeply intertwined.”

When the board approved a K-8, three-story Fifth Ward school for $40 million more than two years ago, the plan included closing Bessie Rhodes. But, at the time, the board promised to keep the Rhodes community together as a “school within a school.”

Fast forward two years, and the district is facing a budget crisis and working to build a two-story K-5 – not K-8 – school that is $8.4 million more but significantly smaller than planned. Those changes left Bessie Rhodes with no alternative location.

According to Kim, the Fifth Ward and Bessie Rhodes are “not two different communities.” District officials have said that 37% of Rhodes students live in the Fifth Ward, which Kim called “a huge overlap.”

“It is difficult to make these decisions that do have negative impact. But I think that’s part of change,” she said. “That’s part of difficult, but necessary, change for all of us. And delaying that change is another way of getting in the way of a certain dream.”

Board member Omar Salem, one of two votes against closing, said he disagreed with the idea that Rhodes and the Fifth Ward school have to be intertwined. He urged his board colleagues to at least consider the idea of wall-to-wall dual language still having a place in the district. Donna Wang Su was the only other vote against closing Rhodes.

Next steps

The August school board meeting will include a presentation outlining plans for further school consolidation and the launch of a middle school dual language program, which is coming to Bessie Rhodes in the fall, district officials said Monday night. Under the existing plan, Rhodes will stay open until the Fifth Ward school begins operating in fall 2026.

On top of that, the district is putting together a third phase of the Student Assignment Planning process, which will include subcommittees that will “engage stakeholders in implementation plans developed from the recommendations generated in SAP II,” according to a presentation district officials gave Monday night.

Part of that project will include updating the 2021 master facilities plan – which identifies $188 million in needed structural repairs – and conducting a new demographic study on enrollment trends to make budget reduction and school closure decisions “with new, relevant, updated data,” according to Superintendent Angel Turner.

But Salem, who served on the SAP II committee, said starting with recommendations from that committee was “disingenuous.”

“We never really finished the process,” he said. “I think part of it was the change from K-8 to K-5. But what was presented were all different recommendations. We as a group never chose the actual ones we wanted to present to the school board.”

The board did not read the full text of the resolution approving the closure of Rhodes on Monday night, and the district did not attach the document to its publicly available agenda. The RoundTable has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain a copy of the complete resolution.

Update: The district has now posted the resolution to close Bessie Rhodes, which is available to view in full here.

Editor’s note: This story has updated to correct that Mya Wilkins is the board vice president.

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