My Comment to the Board Tonight

Below is a letter I sent to the District 65 board this morning in advance of tonight’s meeting (I won’t be able to make it). This is in response to my story yesterday and the bombshell dropped by the Roundtable (reddit discussion).

Hello Board

By now I'm sure you've seen the Roundtable's story on the error in the projections:

https://evanstonroundtable.com/2026/10/25/district-65-financial-projections-error/

I've written about this myself, plus other things:

https://foiagras.com/p/d65-proposal-half-baked/

I think there are some serious problems with the plans you're being presented - both the projections and the plan itself. Not only was there likely a $17M error in finances, but not all of the educational plans are fully baked - consider the situation with relocating STEP (autistic kids) to the basement of a 114 year old building. Compare these plans to the SDRP from earlier in the year and the quality is much worse -- I get the impression that your staff needs more time to learn the business ropes and think this through -- there's nothing wrong with that. For instance, give them time to actually conduct an REIA analysis with the community, work through the 200+ page facility analyses, double check the finances, etc.

I realize part of the rush is to make D65 more desirable for a superintendent. I'm sympathetic to the situation, I know the industry well. But if you execute these plans as is, they're going to be stepping into something much messier and scrambling to tie up all the operational loose ends such as STEP, busing, teacher assignments, etc.

I think you should pause closure work and focus on the superintendent. Give the new superintendent and staff summer 2027 to work on a comprehensive plan and dot the i's and cross the t's. The finances aren't going to zero and you've got the sale of Bessie Rhodes coming up, which should buffer negative losses in the projections this year (assuming they're accurate).

Then put together a full plan that isn't quite as subtractive. If you want to close schools, I think you need to make the case stronger and focus on the upsides: centralized student services (librarians, interventionalists, FACE, etc), genuine specific facility safety risks, and have a "District 65 2040 Roadmap" that lays out a long-term plan that future boards can follow and gives your new superintendent a core mission. Something like the City's "Envision Evanston" but for education. Summer 2027 is an ideal time for your administration to do this work.

Maybe this roadmap includes full or partial collaboration with the high school or a referendum (which is currently dead in my opinion).

I realize this town can be critical and the superintendent job is hard, but successful politics involves finding the win-win. There's a lot of win-wins out there but this current plan is more of a ??-?? - you just don't have enough information in the near-term timeline and it could make things much worse.

Regards,

Tom Hayden