Evanston/Skokie D65 unveils alternatives to grade closures as parents and teachers protest

Evanston/Skokie School District 65 officials announced at the district’s Board of Education meeting Oct. 28 that they were weighing four options on possibly keeping Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies open to seventh and eighth graders. Nearly two weeks ago, the district announced in a surprise letter to parents that it would close down those grades on Nov. 15 and relocate students to other schools that the district would choose.

Before the meeting, families walked in a protest march from Bessie Rhodes to Joseph E. Hill Early Childhood Center. The District 65 Educators’ Council, which is the district’s teachers’ union, also held a separate protest and condemned the lack of communication in the rushed announcement of the school closure as well as their expired contract, which ended on Aug. 22. The district has a $10 million deficit, according to previous reporting.

Before an hour-long public comment session at the Board meeting, during which parents and teachers slammed the Board of Education and administration, Superintendent Angel Turner and Board Members Soo La Kim and Elisabeth “Biz” Lindsay-Ryan read prepared apologies to a packed, at-capacity public for the sudden announcement that Bessie Rhodes was to close two grades without community feedback in less than four weeks.

“We know that we have continued to perpetuate harm to a community that has already been through so much, and I am deeply sorry for the pain and the disruption that has been caused,” Turner said.

A week earlier, Turner had sent a letter to Bessie Rhodes families apologizing for the “missteps in the rollout and announcement” of the proposed closures. In the letter, she wrote that the district would consider alternatives to closing those grades and would go over them with affected families at a meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 29.

“The decision (to close seventh and eighth grade) was made to ensure several things: One, that students will be able to move to their neighborhood schools and be able to receive high quality instruction from highly qualified educators who are licensed by the state of Illinois, and so, that’s where that decision was made.” Turner said.

The district’s Interim Chief of Schools Charmekia McCoy said Bessie Rhodes started off the school year with one teacher vacancy for middle school that grew into three after two teachers quit.

To make up for the vacancies, Bessie Rhodes’ Principal Charlise Berkel is teaching seventh and eighth grade Math and Science, Assistant Principal Sarah Antrim-Graf is teaching seventh and eighth grade World Language Spanish and a paraprofessional is teaching monolingual seventh and eighth grade Math and Science, according to McCoy.

Bessie Rhodes also has teacher vacancies in other grades, which has increased class sizes and required teachers to perform the jobs of multiple teachers, McCoy said. “It’s not as simple as three staff members,” she said.

McCoy said the district is trying to hire teachers to fill the vacancies, but the available pool of applicants either don’t have the necessary credentials or demand a higher rate of pay that the district cannot afford.

Turner unveiled the four options labeled A, B, C and D to the Board of Education and to the public on Monday.

“I want to be clear, there is no perfect option,” Turner said. “All these options have situations that aren’t the greatest and aren’t the best, but these are the options that we came up with after hearing the feedback that has been shared with me and my team.”

Option A would be to keep moving forward with the plan the district announced, which would be for students to leave Bessie Rhodes on Nov. 15 and begin attending their neighborhood middle school on Nov. 18.

Option B, which Turner called a “band-aid,” would be for the district to modify its staffing plan in order for teachers from other schools to come teach at Bessie Rhodes to allow seventh and eighth graders to remain at Bessie Rhodes. She said the cons of that plan were that teachers would operate in a similar capacity to college professors, “essentially coming in and out.”

The modified staffing plan could also interfere with other schools detrimentally as staff heads out to Bessie Rhodes, and the solution could not be permanent because the schools would have the same dilemma at the start of the next school year, Turner said.

Option C would be for seventh and eighth graders to attend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Literary and Fine Arts Magnet School in Evanston. Turner said the pros of that option would be that the middle school students would stay united, but the cons would be that they would start in a new school that they might not be used to, and they might not have the same opportunities to take World Language Mandarin and Spanish classes.

Option D would be for seventh graders to attend King Arts and 8th graders to stay at Bessie Rhodes. One of the drawbacks of that option would be that it could seem unfair for seventh graders to be uniquely forced out, Turner said.

Several Board of Education members were concerned that Options C and D would overwhelm King Arts. Currently, the class sizes for seventh and eighth grade at King Arts are 41 students and 57 students respectively, according to King Arts Principal Rebecca Calloway. Bessie Rhodes has 19 seventh graders and 23 eighth graders, and it would add those to the current school population at King Arts, according to Turner.

Calloway said “We have the space, that’s for sure.”

Board members said they supported Option B, because they saw it as less disruptive for students to stay at the school they attend.

The district’s Communication Manager Hannah Dillow, however, said whichever option the district takes, it is independent from the Board and ultimately decided by the administration. The decision to close seventh and eighth grade in the first place was a “programmatic, administrative choice,” Dillow said.

Turner’s apology letter said the administration would make a choice by the end of this week (Oct. 28-Nov. 1) for seventh and eighth graders at Bessie Rhodes, and the Board of Education will not reconvene for another meeting until Nov. 4 for a Committee of the Whole meeting.

Throughout the evening, parents expressed the frustration and anger they felt towards the district.

“I think it’s laughable,” said Stephanie Roache, a mother of an eighth grader at Bessie Rhodes, after hearing the options presented by the district. “This is something that they should have presented to us two weeks ago,” she said.

Roache said she supports Option B because it would keep her son at the same school he has been at for five years, which is the place where all his friends attend school. 

“I feel like had the announcement (of grade closures) came out with the options, we probably wouldn’t even be in this predicament,” said Katawna “K” Tyler, a mother of an eighth grader at the school. “While we want our kids to stay at Bessie Rhodes, it is also important that they have certified educators, so I understand the difficulties.”

“It just infuriates me how none of this was shared with us (before),” Tyler said.

About 100 people gathered together for the Bessie Rhodes protest march from that school to Joseph E. Hill. They walked along the sidewalk of Church Street and got the attention of drivers who honked horns and helped make noise. The group chanted “Aquí estamos, y no nos vamos,” or “We are here, and we won’t leave” in Spanish among other chants.

Once that protest group arrived at Joseph E. Hill, about 50 to 75 teachers with the teachers’ union also started to arrive to protest their expired contract, donning red shirts, chanting “What do we want? Fair Pay. When do we want it? Now.”

A seventh  grade teacher at Chute Middle School who gave her name as Marina, saying the union requested she not give her full name, said the Bessie Rhodes closure and the expired contracts relate to one another because “they both show the general lack of support that teachers and students have in the district.”

A librarian at Chute, Kefira Philippe, said, “We understand that hard decisions have to be made… but they’re not made in open communication and collaboration with community stakeholders.”

The sudden announcement of the partial school closure rocked the Evanston and Skokie area, partially because the announcement was unexpected to many and did not have any community input. When the Board of Education decided to close the entire school by 2026, the district held three public hearings in which community members gave their input.

Overall, the district is also looking to close more schools, lay off more teachers and cut expenses related to transportation and special education, Turner earlier announced.

The Board of Education had earlier said it was on track to hire an outside consultant to help create a deficit reduction plan for the district at its meeting on Monday, but after hearing presentations from five applicants, Board members said they were not ready to hire someone on the spot. The Board will be able to consider the topic at its next meeting on Nov. 4.