D65 Meet the Candidate: Brandon Utter

First in a 10 day series on District 65 Candidates for Office

This is a post in a series that will run from March 7 to March 17th where I’ve given District 65 Board Candidates the option to post whatever they want on the blog. I gave them no limitations, except to follow the standard comment section rules and I do no editing, beyond formatting.

If you have questions for the candidates, please also follow the rules on the comment section.

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First off, thanks Tom for allowing District 65 Board candidates the opportunity to post on your platform. Big thanks to all of the candidates who originally stepped into the race and the ones that are still in the running. I feel very fortunate to have met you all and to be going through the campaign process with you. Regardless of who ends up on the Board, we have a strong group of dedicated community members to draw from in our candidate pool to help navigate the significant issues the District faces.

For my FOIA GRAS post, I am revisiting comments I made at a District 65 Board Meeting in March of 2024 to illustrate my thought processes and problem solving approaches. For context, this meeting was held before the final vote to close Bessie Rhodes.

One of the core concepts I want to highlight for discussion is the urgent need for us to balance the district. The district is enrolled on average at 69%. Goal enrollment varies by source and type of school, but is generally 80-95%. While enrollment goals are important, they need to be contextualized, particularly at a time when stabilizing the budget is critical. Enrollment goals in and of themselves do not consider budgetary impact, but changes in enrollment can cause budgetary instability. Therefore, we need to balance the district while we balance the budget. The current Board is barely beginning to scratch the surface of these issues.¹ To better contextualize the budgetary implications of schools opening and closing, one can evaluate spending per student per year across the District, which is available on the Illinois Report Card. With that in mind, I want to share edited excerpts from the comments I made to the Board in 3/2024:²

“…If nothing is done with King Arts when the 5th Ward school is open, the cost per student per year, already the highest in the district at $29,000 per student per year, would skyrocket to over $35,000 per student per year. Far more expensive than any other school, costing millions of dollars per year with no additional benefit to students…

If King Arts and Bessie Rhodes were combined into the current King Arts building… the cost per student per year would be close to the district mean, even after adding $2 million for the extra administrative cost. This not only allows BR to remain a K-8 TWI program, it would save nearly $20 million in the 5 years following the opening of the 5^th ward school since it normalizes the cost per student per year.

BR will fit! The King Arts building capacity is 653 students and enrolls 404 presently, BR enrolls 273 presently, making 677 total students in both schools. Once the 5^th ward school opens, we can estimate that about 50 students from BR and 80 students from KA will attend the 5^th ward school. This would make King-Rhodes attendance approximately 550 students, or around 84% capacity. To my knowledge, the district goal for school capacity is 85%...

I welcome any opportunity to discuss these ideas and numbers more, please feel free to call me up in front of the board and engage in a robust discussion. Thank you.”

I want to be clear that I am not advocating that King Arts (or any specific school) closes or that the Foster School construction not proceed—I understand that King Arts offers unique programming and Foster School is important for many reasons. As a parent who has gone through a school closure, I am highly sensitive to this issue³. At the same time, the opening of Foster school will impact King Arts, Willard, Lincolnwood and Kingsley the most.⁴ These schools could shed up to 20% of their enrollees when the new Foster School opens, thereby increasing their annual spending per student. This is due to the fact that the total overhead costs of the school (staff, grounds, utilities, maintenance, etc) will remain the same as fewer students are being educated there. The overhead costs of all impacted schools need to be evaluated as Foster School opens. There have been no publicly discussed plans to do this and it appears that the District is just starting to understand the downstream budgetary and enrollment impacts of opening the Foster School.

We need to be proactive and develop transparent and pragmatic criteria for school consolidation considerations. Consolidations may need to happen in parallel with the Foster School opening to balance budgetary effects. We need to take a holistic approach, unlike what we saw in the decision making process around Bessie Rhodes.

My main goal for posting this on FOIA GRAS is to demonstrate a budget-forward approach to considering district enrollment balance. I acknowledge that there are limitations to any approach to these complex issues and I am open to working through a range of solutions including creative/intentional consolidation plans and shifting programming to underutilized buildings to reduce overhead. I have reservations about making quick moves to sell off assets of the District including buildings and land. The liquidation of these assets will not produce a durable financial solution and may limit options in the future, including options for revenue, expanding pre-K, and strengthening special education resources. We need to keep room for a growth mindset here, even as we confront the realities of our shared situation head on.

Overall, I hope to catalyze discussion on objective metrics for school consolidations and welcome ideas for solving our budgetary and enrollment issues. I assume a shared vision of making decisions that perpetuate the least harm on our children, communities, and programming that promote academic excellence. I appreciate any and all input on this and related ideas.

1. I want to point out here that the Board is not a monolith. Omar Salem in particular has been interested in these issues and willing to discuss them.

2. Note that these comments were written for public speaking and the data is one year behind

3. I am not running a campaign to reverse decision making on Bessie Rhodes. Rather, I believe the situation with Bessie Rhodes highlights the poor decision making processes of the Board and District. It also shows the dangers of making decisions around school closures in a vacuum without considering downstream effects and alternative solutions.

4. Full disclosure, my wife attended Willard before being redistricted to Lincolnwood. Multiple of my siblings-in-law also graduated from Lincolnwood. My in-laws continue to live in the Lincolnwood catchment area. I am very aware that families in the district, including at Lincolnwood, are worried about what could happen to their schools. Having experienced a school closure myself, I deeply empathize with these families and I am committed to an open and transparent process around these discussions.