In addition to an intense discussion about the ongoing budget crisis, District 65 board members heard from administrators Monday night about upcoming plans for a third phase of the Student Assignment Planning process and for shifting fourth- through eighth-grade athletics from internal oversight to the Evanston Park District.
In the first phase of SAP, a committee of parents, teachers, staff, administrators and other community members met in 2021 and 2022 to redraw school attendance boundaries. The committee ultimately endorsed walkable neighborhood schools for all students as its top priority, which led the board to approve a plan to build a new school in the Fifth Ward.
SAP II called for another community committee to evaluate student attendance data and gather feedback from families to make recommendations for where specialized programs – like African Centered Curriculum and two-way immersion for English and Spanish speakers to become bilingual – should be housed going forward, given the district’s significant enrollment decline in recent years.
But SAP II paused its work in October 2023, when then-interim Superintendent Angel Turner revealed that the previously planned Fifth Ward school would cost $25 million over budget.
The board and administration then spent about six months working with architects to redesign a cheaper school with a cost closer to the original budget of $40 million.
Four priorities
Kirby Callam, the district’s director of strategic project management, presented a reformed plan for a third phase of SAP on Monday. This time around, instead of a community committee, the process will be led internally by a team of district administrators. Callam identified four priorities for SAP III:
- Foster (Fifth Ward) school transition planning
- School consolidation(s)
- TWI/dual language programming
- Early childhood program expansion
“SAP III will be driven by distinct District-staffed teams who engage with content experts and stakeholder advisory groups,” Callam wrote in a memo to the board. “The District teams will consider feasibility; the Race Equity Inclusion Assessment (REIA); and financial, operational, and community impacts when forming draft and final recommendations to the Superintendent.”
According to Callam, the “community-based stakeholder groups” will include teachers, parents and other Evanston residents. Based on a preliminary breakdown of the timeline for the project that he provided, the district team will meet once with a stakeholder group, then develop recommendations and meet with a stakeholder group again to get feedback.
The elephant in the room during this process is the district’s $188 million in deferred maintenance on its existing buildings and declining enrollment amid a budget crisis that got even worse in the 2024 fiscal year.
“We have a lot of buildings that need a lot of work, and we have an opportunity to rightsize the number of buildings given the fact that enrollment has decreased significantly,” said Robert Grossi, a financial consultant the district brought in last year to address the 2023 budget deficit. “That obviously has to be a strong consideration to stabilize the school issue. We don’t want it, and there’s going to be tough decisions, but we want to maximize student learning in the most cost-effective manner.”
More school closings?
The board already voted in June to close the Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies, a K-8 magnet program for TWI students, once the new Foster School opens in the Fifth Ward in 2026. But a key element of SAP III will likely include voting on additional school closures, details of which remain unclear.
As for administrators leading the process instead of a community committee, board members Omar Salem and Joey Hailpern stressed the importance of still gathering enough insight from teachers and families to make the best decisions for students. Their colleagues Mya Wilkins and Soo La Kim, though, said they liked this change in procedure because it will let administrators do their jobs efficiently while keeping the community updated.
The district team will give monthly updates on the project at board meetings and Turner will also provide “video recaps.”
“I think we are struggling with the transparency and trust concern coming off the conversations around Bessie Rhodes’ closure and the financial conversation that we’ve been having, but need to have again today,” said Hailpern.
“I think there need to be opportunities for people to have a view that isn’t just getting updates from the team leads on this. There might be focus groups or conversations and these initiatives where you’re like, ‘This is a really important conversation, and we should replicate it and bring it maybe to a board meeting to say that we’re going to talk about this one thing publicly’ – if not have the meetings in this room so that it can be YouTube-ified like our meetings are.”
Sports move to the park district
Meanwhile, in a cost-cutting move, Assistant Superintendent of Safety, Climate and Athletics Terrance Little informed board members Monday of a plan to move sports program operations from the district’s own staff to the Evanston Park District.
Starting this upcoming school year, the park district will run fourth- and fifth-grade athletics, and all middle-school sports will shift to their purview in the 2025-2026 year, according to Little.
A key part of this decision is that the district will no longer have to pay its own coaches, athletic directors and chaperones, he said. The full price for participating will be between $20 and $55 per team for students who do not receive free or reduced-price lunches, said Melissa Messinger, executive chief of strategic communications and project management.
Hailpern said he hopes the board will soon get a sense of how much of an impact this move could have on district spending, and that decisions like this will be made with more advanced warning and public discussion in the future.
“In middle school, most of the teams are coached by our staff, so – I realized this as this was happening – I was kind of hoping they would be a part of the conversation and transition planning sooner,” he said, “so you could hear from them the good, the bad, things to look out for.”
District 65 launches third student assignment process, overhauls athletics is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.