District 65 Election History, Board History and 5Essentials Data

Welcome FOIA Gras new intern, Caroline!

Hey Everyone! Thanks to your donations, FOIA Gras can afford to hire an intern this summer! Her name is Caroline Doyle, and she’s an upcoming freshman at ETHS. I’ve assigned her to write a couple of articles this summer on a few topics:

• Data collection on D65 School Board History (see below)

• Research on Flock Safety - the license plate reader (LPR) cameras that have started appearing around town. According to Flock Safety, in the last month, half a million plates were captured by the EPD.

• History of D65 and the pay gap, particularly I want her to dig into the original reason(s) why and how K-8 Educators are paid so much less than HS educators in Illinois.

• The Native History of Evanston and Ridge Road. I’ve come across some really cool maps and want to find

She’s also helping me become a more competent writer when it comes to data - I had her figure out how to use datawrapper, so we can embed data into documents (instead of copying and pasting)

She is being paid for the internship, but if you’d like to donate a few bucks to an incoming ETHS student who is a capable writer, you can donate at the link below and I promise I’ll forward the money to her.

Take it from here, Caroline!

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History of D65 Board and Elections

I’ve been doing research on the history of the D65 board, and compiled a list of the members and the election data from recent years, which I gathered from local news sources, and the Cook County clerks office website.

Looking at the data from the elections, you can see that voter turnout for elections is very low, with less than 10% turnout some years. The highest you can see is in 2017, when 34.04% of eligible voters cast their vote. This could possibly be because of the 2016 presidential election, which took place only six months beforehand, which left many Evanston residents unhappy. Above is a table of the data from all election years since 2009.

In addition to the election results, I also gathered information on the board members who were in back fifteen years. There is a search feature where you can search up names and dates.

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Principal-Teacher Trust

Along with the history of the D65 board, I also did research on the history of trust between principals and teachers throughout D65 schools and ETHS in the past four years. This follows up on some comments from a prior story.

You can find this information at 5Essentials which is a website that shows the results of surveys that D65 and ETHS students and teachers take. The lower the numbers, the lower the trust, and the higher the numbers, the higher the trust is. You can see in some schools, specifically the ones highlighted in red, that there are large dips in principal-teacher trust at some point or another, and that they can come very quickly.

Here’s some background on Principal Changes made for notable schools:

• King Arts - New Principals Named for King Arts and Haven (May 2020)

• Dewey: Tom wrote about the former Dewey Principal a few months ago who ended up suing and settling with District 65.

• Lincolnwood- New Lincolnwood principal starts July 1 (July 2022)

• Haven- New Principals Named for King Arts and Haven (May 2020)