D65 Meet the Candidate: Peter Bogira

Post 7/11 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, thank you Tom, for all the work you’ve done to cover local governance and inform fellow citizens. The connection between journalism and accountability is an important dynamic, and you’ve raised the bar for both through your Substack. Along those lines, I am grateful for the opportunity to use this platform to connect with local stakeholders trying to decide how to use their valuable vote this spring.

As the son of a journalist and author who made a career telling stories in the space afforded by loose deadlines and word counts, this was both a tough and relished assignment after all the many structured campaign engagements I have participated in over the past couple months along with fellow candidates.

Some of you may have become more familiar with me through my website or the various candidate forums and interviews published over the past couple months. I’ll touch some more on some of my key focal areas but also hope to leave you with a little personal impression as well. One of the roots of the frustration shared by many recently has been a frayed connection between our district leadership (board included) and the community it serves, and rebuilding that goes beyond transparency into clarity and relatability. At times, it has felt like that frayed connection pulls some of the humanity out of our interactions, and regardless of the outcome in this election, I hope people feel a noticeable difference in the coming years in their experience with our School Board.

As a kid with an August birthday, I did a bonus year of preschool, and I am so grateful my parents chose to delay my entry into kindergarten until I was more developmentally equipped (more on this later). We moved to Evanston the spring of my kindergarten year, where I attended Dawes in that unique annexed building we’ve been hoping to attach to the main one for decades. Though it was a short couple of months in Ms. Lee’s classroom, one of my most vivid memories was when a classmate convinced me to try fitting into a locker with the door closed. I couldn’t figure out how to open the door from the inside, and my co-conspirator returned to the classroom, so I had to wait for the teacher to come open the door for the panicked six-year-old stuck within. Adebayo “DB” Sanni, I never held a grudge, but I do remember to this day!

I think there are parallels to this in how many people in our community have felt in recent years within our school district, potentially even more so in recent months based on the onslaught of federal attacks on many of our core values – and for some, attacks directly on their identity. Frustrated. Stuck. Uncertain. Fearful. These types of sentiments, felt by fellow community members, friends, and family members, are what prompted me to enter the fray as a D65 school board candidate, because throughout my life I’ve often felt drawn to helping people navigate out of those situations and feelings. It’s something I do nearly constantly as a dedicated parent to three young kids.

‘Okay, but there are 11 other candidates who also seem like nice people, right? Why should you be one of my four votes?’

I’ve wrestled with this question a lot over the past few months, from the day we found out there were 17 of us who filed for candidacy, to my first encounter with the “real politics” via an attempt to remove me and two other candidates from the ballot, to the absolute gauntlet that 12 of us have been through over the last two months of the campaign. Self-promotion is perhaps the element of this campaign that lands furthest from my comfort zone, and I’ve had to ground it all in knowing that if I earn the privilege to serve as board member, I’m out there for the greater good and to represent everyone – regardless of whether you checked the box next to Ballot Position 149 (shameless plug). Voting is a very personal choice, and the best I can do is adequately inform you, just as I’d seek to ensure the District does if I’m one of the board members tasked with its oversight.

The five D65 unions have seen qualities in me as a candidate that earned their endorsement, something I am incredibly proud of considering the accomplished peers in this race with me. Part of why this matters is that the staff in each of our buildings holds the key to the core of what we want for school-aged kids in Evanston: to be engaged with learning and to feel safe, seen, and heard by the staff they interact with daily. To make that a reality, we need to ensure our educators and staff feel excited about their job, and that happens through being engaged, and feeling heard by the teams steering the ship. The 5Essentials is a great predictor for student success, in part due to the staff input, to diagnose areas of success and growth. Along those lines, I encourage any readers here who have kids in the district to take the time to fill it out – the current survey closes on March 28th.

A few of my key priorities I hope to collaborate with board colleagues and Dr. Turner on include:

• Accountability

  • This word is so heavily utilized across many local campaigns, it helps to understand a candidate’s interpretation and intentions behind it. The Board must sharpen the way our goals and indicators are framed in our Superintendent’s contract and our strategic plan, as those should serve as the north star for our District and create a more functional board.

  • While there are efforts to revisit our strategic plan, we need a much clearer way of providing this data to the community. If we consider posting something in BoardBook or discussing it three hours into a Board meeting, it might meet the minimum definition of “transparency”, but falls short of providing the clarity that our engaged community deserves.

  • The Board should also partake in annual self-assessments via the Illinois Association for School Boards (IASB) as a periodic check-in on how we’re faring on upholding the six core principles of a school board.

  • As we embark on a transformative year for our district, the other aspect of accountability is in taking great care in how we formulate criteria around school consolidations and closures and how the community is brought in – and kept in the loop – along the way. We cannot leave people feeling like their feedback was requested solely to check a box. Yes, in the end, we will need to make hard budgetary decisions in part due to the inaction of past boards, but these major shifts should be done in lockstep with the community.

  • On that note, I think it’s important in SDRP Phase III that we push our consultants to provide more exhaustive options around potential areas of reduction, beyond just facilities and personnel. I wish we’d seen more push for this during Phase II to get a head start on this, as it’s clear that closing buildings alone is not going to make up the estimated $15M in reductions needed for the 26/27 school year.

• Early Childhood and Pre-K Expansion

  • If we want a more equitable experience in D65, it is vital we continue to build out our EC/PK programming to ensure availability and access. There are many important ways we provide support and interventions for our K-8 students, but we can make an outsized impact the earlier they are provided.

  • Our students walk into kindergarten classrooms with varying degrees of readiness, and we can better support them when we have a more comprehensive understanding of them beforehand, through quality programs for which we set the standards. This also potentially gives us more options for families around entry into kindergarten, particularly if they need another year of pre-K like I did.

  • As we look to shape the vision of our facilities and programs within them, this should remain a key part of the conversation. This includes how we remove barriers (and encourage participation) to families eligible for Early Head Start, particularly as we pivot from our partnership with IWSE.

• Responsible Use of Technology

  • This has been coming up in conversation all over the place for years, and we’re beginning to see community efforts to organize interests and concerns, most recently through a group called Screen Sense Evanston. It is time for the District to reflect upon our philosophy around technology at school and for us to establish policies that support it.

  • Two immediate areas I see this coming into play are through the adoption of a similar personal phone policy to the one implemented by ETHS and an audit of how district-issued devices are being utilized, including both academic and non-academic purposes.

Though my primary motivations for running in this campaign are not skewed towards benefitting my own children, I’m hoping to improve their school experience by making positive changes that benefit all our students in some way. They’ve taken interest in my campaign along this journey, and one even wants to knock on a some doors with some familiar talking points (a few liberties taken):

In closing, if any of you have felt stuck – like six-year-old me in that locker – amid some of the challenges locally and/or nationally, I can empathize and sympathize with you. I truly believe there are far better days ahead for D65 in the not-so-distant future, and I would be honored to be a part of making that a reality. Please go vote – and encourage your fellow neighbors and friends to do the same. Thank you for reading, and for your role in shaping the future.

-Peter Bogira