Teachers Get a Tentative Deal & 17 District 65 Board Candidates

No Current D65 Board Members Running for Re-election

There was a lot of local news in the 5-6pm hour last night.

First, the District 65 Teachers and the Board came to a tentative agreement, announced at last night’s Board Meeting. I don’t yet know any details on the deal. Here’s the statement put out on the subject;

Dear District 65 Community - 

We are pleased to announce that a tentative agreement has been reached between bargaining teams representing the School Board and the District 65 Educators’ Council (DEC). The teams have been engaged in collaborative bargaining sessions since March and most recently participated in two sessions with a federal mediator on November 12 and November 18, with the latter wrapping up only minutes ago.

The DEC bargaining team will bring the contract to its membership in the coming days for ratification. Following ratification by the DEC membership, the agreement will be forwarded to the board for approval. Additional details will be forthcoming upon approval by DEC and the School Board.

Thank you to all of the individuals who have been involved in the bargaining process and to the many wonderful and talented educators who call District 65 home.

Dr. Angel Turner, Superintendent

Dr. Trisha Baker, DEC President

Last night’s meeting was packed, filling both the main room and the overflow room with journalists, parents, and teachers. There were lots of 🔥 public comments in support of the teachers and criticizing the administration. I highly recommend the moving public comment given by a District paraprofessional around the 1:13 mark in the meeting.

Yours truly gave a hastily prepared public comment that I had to change after the announcement of the agreement. I don’t think I was the only one riffing a bit.

Second, the filing deadline passed for the upcoming school board elections. 17 candidates in total have filed petitions for candidacy — none of the current board members up for re-election have filed. The terms for Joey Hailpern, Soo La Kim, Biz Lindsay-Ryan, and Donna Su will officially end in April.

Here’s the full candidate list for the April 1, 2025 election (I’m not sure if it shows all 17 in the email or if you have to click through to view online - Substack is weird about tables)

And for District 202, it’s 4 out of 4 candidates, including a familiar name, John Martin, who ran for the District 65 election in 2023 and lost by around 150 votes.

With so many candidates, I need to re-assess how I am going to cover this spring’s election. I was originally going to give coverage to the Evanston Mayoral, Aldermanic, and School District races. But 17 is a lot of people to cover for a single race, so I am debating covering only District 65.

For now, I’ve reached out to most of the candidates to get a basic introduction about their background and reasons for running. I will make a post on that subject later in the week.

Finally, in last night’s meeting there was an interesting discussion as the Board followed their new process of approving all contracts over $25,000 - a much needed reform, hopefully driven by some of the reporting from this blog. You can read last night’s list of contracts, including a few big ones related to staffing, a topic I wrote about the other day.

• $2,400,000 for Epic Special Education Staffing, temporary

  staffing for special education positions using local funds.

• $100,224 to Ambergris Healthcare Staffing, temp staffing

  for healthcare positions using IDEA and local funds.

• $225,000 to Stivers Staffing, school based temp staffing

  for lunchroom supervisors and admin

  assistants using local funds.

The board had a very interesting conversation about staffing costs and the sustainability of these types of expenses. The board eventually approved the expenses, with Joey Hailpern being the lone no vote.

You can hear the discussion around 2:30:00 or so in the meeting.