D65 still up in the air on a new school

Anyone who thought that serving on the school board in Evanston was a piece of cake ought to look at a tape of Monday night’s Evanston/Skokie District 65 board meeting before they do anything rash.

Anyone who thought that serving on the school board in Evanston was a piece of cake ought to look at a tape of Monday night’s Evanston/Skokie District 65 board meeting before they do anything rash.

Faced with projections of rising enrollment through the end of this decade, coupled with an electorate that is not shy about expressing its opposition to paying more taxes, the Board spent all evening examining nine different scenarios and finding none that most were comfortable with pursuing.

Each of the viable scenarios, they concluded early on, would require a referendum to pass in order to sell bonds to finance needed construction. But they were convinced that, unless they explored every possible alternative in considerable detail and were able to persuade the electorate that their final decision was the best for the district, their efforts would come to naught.

All summer long, a special ad hoc committee had examined the problem and had recommended that a kindergarten through eighth grade school, built east of the canal in the central core of Evanston, would not only satisfy the district’s space needs, but would also bring “social justice” to hundreds of kids who daily are bused out of their neighborhood to several outlying schools as a 1960s solution to racial equality.
 

But that would require a referendum, which they feared would be unsuccessful.
 

Should they add classrooms to existing schools? That would cost about as much as building the new school, but would not solve the problem of the kids that have to be bused.
 

Should they redistrict the schools? That would cause more people to be bused and would result in some families having siblings going to many different schools. And besides, they’d still run out of space.
 

Should they assign each school to serve just one or two grades? That would cause even more headaches, as each student would have to figure out a way to navigate around a new school every couple of years.
 

Or should they do nothing at all and just muddle through, year after year? Perish the thought.

At one point, after they took a short break so that members could call their families to tell them not to wait up, Board President Katie Bailey asked her colleagues: “What should we do next, or is this where I’m supposed to be a leader?” Everyone laughed.

They finally reached a tentative agreement to build a school, but they asked the administration to run the numbers to determine which would work the best—a K-8 school, a K-5 school, or a 6-7-8 school.
 

So they’ll look at it again at their next meeting, knowing that their final solution may cause many of their constituents to question their sanity.