More District 65 Bad News: Enrollment, Equity Fails, School Closures

Emerging from my election fear hole for a quick story on tonight's Board meeting

There’s a District 65 Board meeting tonight. You can view the agenda. Lots of bad news in the agenda.

Enrollment Continues to Drop

District 65 published their an enrollment number for the 2024-25 School year: 5783. This is a 17% decrease since the 2020-21 school year and a 20% decrease over a ten year period, since the 2024-25 school year.

You can compare the numbers provided in today’s meeting against what the District has provided to the ISBE via the annual statement of affairs (click Financial Reports). I’ve attempted to exclude Park & Rice students using a similar methodology, the numbers don’t quite line up, but are close enough.¹

I’ve highlighted two years, 2017-2018 and 2018-2019, where District 65 provided the state with completely identical numbers. Oops!

The future projections don’t look so good either, they’re projecting an enrollment of 5,313 by the 2029-2030 school year, a further 8% decline.

Enrollment Drops Compound Budget Issues

Initially, when I started this blog, I had the sense that enrollment didn’t really matter. This is absolutely false.

Most of District 65’s funding comes from local sources. But as I wrote in this story, enrollment drops create problems by blowing up the District’s “per cap” numbers. When enrollment goes down and costs remain the same, the “per cap” goes up. Consider the state law and guidance that the ISBE issues (bold is mine):

Private Tuition (105 ILCS 5/14-7.02)

…

In practice, there is no district with a per capita tuition rate less than $4,500; therefore, the district is obligated for two times their district per capita tuition charge and the state reimburses the district for the remainder of the approved tuition rate paid for the school year, including summer school when approved. If a student is enrolled less than a full year, all items are prorated down accordingly

So as the per cap increases, the District is responsible for an increasingly large percentage of special education costs. The per cap almost doubled since 2017-18 and if they don’t dramatically reduce the budget, this creates a compounding effect on the budget crisis.

It’s even worse if you’re increasing costs while enrollment drops. Consider that over this time window, District 65 increased non-Principal total administrator compensation from $5.6 million in 2015-16 to $15.4 million today.

Other Bad News: Equity Report

The Board is also being presented with the EPI - Equity Progress Indicator Report. Despite spending millions of dollars on equity-related consultants and replacing the discipline policy with restorative practices the reporting today shows the District making negative progress improving the racial achievement gap in Evanston.

Consider reporting buried in the appendix, which shows a continued decline of Black students meeting criteria since 2022². In language arts, Black kids meeting criteria dropped from 33.1% to 31.7% over three years.³

And here’s mathematics, showing Black kids sliding further from 14.6% to 13.5% meeting criteria over the same time period, while everyone else saw increases. This is really bad!

Despite the focus on equity, this result was essentially left out of the top line report they’re providing the Board tonight — buried in the appendix. The report provided to the District does give a shout out to the Pacific Education Group - the for-profit corporation that offers the Beyond Diversity™ and Courageous Conversations™ training, which I have written about extensively.

Between ETHS and District 65, since 2007, Evanston residents have invested over a million dollars in training programs with this firm. Two months ago, in the August meeting, the District 65 Board approved another $52,125 expense with this company.

We are very clearly failing Black kids in this town. After more than 15 years in Evanston and continually worsening numbers, I think it’s a fair question to ask whether the current approach is working.⁴

More Bad News: CFO Working on Building Closure

Also included in today’s report is an update on goals from the CFO, Tamara Mitchell. She lists the following goal regarding the deficit reduction plan:

I am championing the portion of the Framework for Deficit Reduction Plan that is focused on identifying resources to address major capital needs, while taking a leadership role in the work overall. The skeletal deficit reduction plan presented during the September board meeting as part of the budget transportation will be used to drive further work. As for major capital needs, this work is aligned with work that Dr. Beardsley is championing related to school closing and consolidation, we have been able to partner.

To date, the PMA team has developed and shared initial estimates of potential operational cost reductions related to building closure. Having this information is key, as those estimated cost reductions can be repurposed to any capital improvement plans. Additionally, Northwestern University partners with an interest in the work were identified during our October 16th meeting, and more will be shared on that collaboration in the 2nd quarter update.

I will be submitting a FOIA later this week for a copy of this report. It’s unclear to what degree Northwestern is involved in this process. Also listed on the agenda, is an item related to the consultant, it’s unclear who they will be hiring.

5.B) Approval of Structural Deficit Reduction Planning Consulting Services Contract

I would like to say .. if you scroll up about two blocks in this story, you can read about how the D65 Administration just YOLO’ed the enrollment numbers, submitting the same thing for two different years to the ISBE. Or consider the Bessie Rhodes stories, where the Board / SAP committees were presented with incorrect information - the parents literally brought poster board with correct information to Board meetings!

I have nothing against Ms. Mitchell, but I’m not sure the Board or community should trust the District 65 administration at this point. This stuff needs to be out in the open. I realize it’s a new administration (sort of), but the track record here is not great.

There are a lot of community members staring at these documents now, and I think these reports should be shown in public, as soon as possible. I call upon the Board to share all financial reports, like this, with the community.

1. Here’s how I counted all students from the ASA minus Park and Rice. I’m not sure why they don’t totally line up, it may be a different counting methodology, but they’re all pretty close to the stated numbers.

2. I don’t know exactly how they define this but it is labeld as “MAP Growth: Meeting College Readiness Benchmarks (CRB) ACT Benchmark”

3. Asian kids also dropped from 75.4% meeting language arts criteria to 63.8%.

4. I personally believe that the best way to close the achievement gap is to find, recruit, and retain the best teachers in the region and get them in front of the kids who need it the most. On this front, we’re failing - the teachers don’t even have a contract for this year and every summer we lose 5-8% of the teacher base to attrition. Hiring a firm like PEG seems to make everyone feel like they’re doing something but I have seen absolutely no evidence that it works.