Letter to the editor: Why you should care about D65 enrollment losses

The District 65 board and administration are finally acknowledging what anyone who has been paying attention has recognized – that the many families who have left District 65 schools during and following the pandemic are not coming back. This is resulting in steep, likely permanent losses in enrollment for District 65 which in turn has impacts that you, as an Evanston citizen with or without kids in District 65, should care about – especially since it appears that the District 65 board and administration does not.

Here are the numbers: At the start of the 2018-2019 school year, there were 7,422 children enrolled in D65 schools; at the start of the 2022-2023 school year, there were 6,116 children enrolled in D65 schools. That amounts to the loss of over 1,300 students, or approximately 17% of enrolled students. As large as those numbers sound, it could be worse – many local private schools have wait lists to get in. In other words, there is a line to get out the door of Evanston public schools.

Those are the numbers that bring us to today – and the future does not appear promising. At the January 17 board meeting, Sarita Smith, the manager of student assignments, projected a loss of another 456 students in the next five years. 

Any business that loses 17% of its customers would be intensely curious as to what was happening and why, and would be taking serious measures to correct the outflow of customers. Of course, District 65 is not a business – and its approach to the loss of students shows this. The assumption that was made by the board and administration alike is that the losses were being driven by pandemic and that families would return once things returned to “normal.” That was not borne out in reality, as the recent report to the Board shows. The task of finding out why people have left and what can be done to correct course is not one that the D65 board or administration have demonstrated the slightest interest in addressing.

So even though the board and administration don’t seem to care that families are leaving and not returning, why should you, the Evanston resident, care even if you don’t have children in District 65 schools?

• Schools are the glue of the neighborhood – This should be obvious, but schools are places where children make friends – sometimes life-long friends – who live a few blocks away. Parents get to know each other through school events, volunteering, seeing each other on the playground. Schools help build communities, and when we have families leave the district to find education for their children elsewhere, it weakens the bonds of our community.

• Diminished support for our schools – One of the shared values in our community has been support for our schools and our teachers. The school funding referendum in 2017 passed with over 80% of the vote. When a teacher’s strike was a possibility in 2016, “Support D65 teachers” bumper stickers sprouted up everywhere – and can still be seen on the streets even today.

However, when so many families are taking their children elsewhere, there is no reason to expect that level of community support to continue. Moving a child out of a school and away from established friends is a traumatic move for the whole family – but families are very clearly making it with frightening regularity. And even if they remain in Evanston, there is no reason to expect that they will continue to support D65 schools. Whatever issue they had with D65 was powerful enough that they chose to endure the trauma of a school change. And, in the case of families who elected to go to private school, they also chose to take the hit to family finances. Expecting them to continue to support a school system that they felt failed to deliver sufficient value to their families is utterly unrealistic.

One reason that we should all care about community support for our schools is the dire need our existing school buildings have for repairs and upgrades. Last year, the district hired a consultant to determine what needed to be done for the existing schools in the district. Their report showed in excess of $180 million of repairs and upgrades were needed. 

At this point, the district has not released a plan to address these repairs. To be sure, it will take money, and a lot of it. That money will eventually have to come from fundraising, bonds, tax increases or some combination thereof. Whichever method, there will need to be a community decision that D65 schools are worth opening their checkbook for. When families are leaving and investing their money in their children’s education elsewhere, continued community support should not be taken as a given.

• Loss of state support – District 65 receives the great bulk of its revenue from local property taxes, and is not shy about taking as much as possible in property taxes. The last vote the board took on property taxes, it approved the maximum allowable increase in its levy – 5.89%. State funding is a relatively small percentage of the district’s revenue, about 7%. 

In 2017, the state passed a new school funding statute. Among the provisions in the statute was a “hold harmless” provision which assured all districts would receive the same level of funding – unless there is a “significant enrollment decrease.” What that means exactly was never completely defined, probably because the vagueness of it made it palatable to everyone. To date, the state has not defined what that means.

However, at some point, the state will find itself in an economic pinch, and one place that they will inevitably look to find some savings is by setting a numerical definition of what that “significant enrollment decrease” term means, because it means that they are being overly generous to school districts that have significantly fewer students in them than was the case when the funding formula was passed.

When that day comes, District 65 will almost certainly find itself on the wrong side of that definition, as we are suffering larger losses percentage-wise than Chicago Public Schools. Perhaps Springfield will spare CPS, perhaps they won’t – but they certainly won’t be sparing those districts with larger enrollment losses than CPS.

But the amount of state support as a percentage is so low, does that really matter? It absolutely does, as the board has expressed on multiple occasions that it is projecting structural deficits in years to come. The pain from whatever cuts are going to going to be needed to address the structural deficit will only be magnified with some loss in state funding.

• School closures – At the start of the 2018-2019 school year, the three Evanston middle schools averaged approximately 750 students; the neighborhood elementary schools, approximately 450 students. Today, numbers alone would appear to justify the closing the closing of one middle school and two neighborhood schools.

And this is before considering the impact of the new Fifth Ward school. If you thought that building a new school building in a district with declining enrollment was madness, be advised: that ship has sailed. The district has already borrowed the money and is committed to having the new building open for the start of the 2025-2026 school year. Its projected 900-student enrollment will come primarily from the north Evanston schools, as students residing in the Fifth Ward will no longer be bused to the north Evanston schools. This leaves a huge issue of unused capacity in north Evanston schools where it will be difficult to justify keeping four neighborhood elementary schools open.

While north Evanston schools will doubtless be on the firing line when it comes time to consider school closures, the district will likely not be able to confine closures to north Evanston only. The reason? The funds for building the new school are going to come from saving money from not busing children from the Fifth Ward. If the district finds itself busing children around North Evanston, those savings are gone – and with it, the money to pay off the loans for the new school. When the day comes to start closing schools, north Evanston schools will probably not be the only ones closed.

Once a school closes, the next issue is what becomes of the property. There is obviously a huge range of outcomes as to what might become of those buildings and the surrounding grounds – they could become community center type buildings, as happened with the former Noyes School building and the former Foster School building. Or they could be sold to developers, and your neighborhood school could be torn down to be turned into luxury condos or McMansions. Whatever becomes of those buildings and playgrounds, this much is true: it will change the neighborhood forever.

The district should be reaching out to families who left to find out why they left and why they have not returned. I don’t believe that a chef should re-work his menu because there is an unhappy diner, but if recurrent themes emerge on this point, prudence would dictate that there be some course correction made. A school district that hemorrhages students at the rate this one has is not a healthy one – and the bleeding needs to stop.

Barry Doyle

District 65 parent