Why is District 65 Closing Bessie Rhodes School?
Esto no tiene sentido
I’ve been hesitant to write about too much about the Bessie Rhodes closure because I know very little about bilingual education. I’m not bilingual myself and I don’t purport to know the best pedagogical tools for language learners.
However, the public comments during board meetings have been very contentious, so I feel the need to chime in. The high level summary is that the D65 Board of Education wants to close Bessie Rhodes, the two way immersion (TWI) magnet school. In order to do so, they need three public hearings. To date, they’ve had two of those hearings. The final one is on May 20th.
There is a final vote on June 10th to close the school, the same meeting where the fifth ward school name and mascot will be announced.
Anyway, regarding Bessie Rhodes, the closure hearings have been passionate. You can watch them below on YouTube.1
Technically (or pedagogically), the heart of the issue is summarized well by Melissa Rosenzweig’s op-ed in the Evanston Roundtable.
Other elementary schools in District 65 offer tracks, or cohorts, of TWI within their K-5 general education programs: Dawes (one track), Dewey (one track), Oakton (one track), Washington (two tracks) and Willard (one track). At Bessie Rhodes, there are no tracks. Instead, all students are provided with “wall-to-wall” TWI: all of the classes, programming and staff services are designed to be bilingual and inclusive. In addition, at Bessie Rhodes students are encouraged to be not just bilingual, but multilingual, and they are taught one semester of Mandarin each year, too.
The May 6th meeting ended with public comments from Stephanie Mendoza, the Evanston City Clerk who touched upon the othering that happens to bilingual children in the District;
I was hopeful that my daughter would go into a school where she would just be my daughter she would just be a kid learning Spanish, communicating with her parents and communicating with her teachers [in Spanish]. She would not be a Spanish kid. And that's what you're setting her up for ... I went through this with my boys coming home every day, "Ma, the kids don't want to play with me because I'm the Spanish kid."
Board President Sergio Hernandez replied to Ms. Mendoza, which is pretty unusual in a Board meeting. I’ve transcribed his response, which you can read. Essentially he argues that he too was othered as a child for not being a native speaker. 2
Again, I think, for me as a board member and as a bilingual educator, bilingual education is the most important thing in my life. And it saved my life when I was ashamed, when I was a little boy. I was in third grade. I wanted to change my name to a white name cause everything I read, every book that I read, had a white kid in it. TV -- white folks, right? And I told my mom one day, "Look, I want to change my name to Keith." Because it sounds like a white name and its the name of a baseball player in the Chicago Cubs back in the 80s. Keith had -- porque -- he had the same name as I had. And she said, "Porque estás loco? Porque te quieres cambiar tu nombre? Es el nombre de tu papá." I’m like, "Ok. Pero de todos modos."
But then, he goes on to argue that the best solution is .. well, I’m not exactly sure what he’s advocating for besides hand-wavey concepts of equity and not liking people who take their kids on European vacations.
We are investing in black, brown, and working-class white students to have the same access that they have not had before. So I just want to be very clear. This hurts. I wish I could have it all. I wish we could keep the K-8 model as self-contained. I really do.
But what we're looking for is moving just from beyond one building to ensuring that every student, every -- specifically, every Latino and black student and working-class student, whatever race they are, has the same access to the resources they need because that hasn't been the case.
Because we know there's families here in this community who have all the resources. They can take their kiddos to, uh, get -- have tutoring and take them to trips -- you know, one-week trips to Europe. And the rest of us are here hustling and trying to work and make sure that our kids are doing their homework. We want to level the playing field at a systems level. That's what we're striving for.
He ends by saying;
And that's what we're working for here. So again, I'm breaking protocol here, but I -- I felt I had to respond. That is the purpose: A system-wide change. A transformation of a system that has not been accountable to every student.
I left wondering - what the hell is he talking about? There’s nobody suggesting a system-wide change in the way the schools are accountable here. This isn’t a zero sum game between Bessie Rhodes Parents and some kind of magical equity utopia. At best, the District is adding some specific in-school tracking and professional development for educators. At worst, he’s blowing up an entire part of the District that is accountable to those kids and replacing it with .. more professional development?
The way I see it, it boils down to two issues;
Non-native English speaking kids feel othered and excluded from the generic District 65 programming and community.
There is a pedagogical argument to be made for wall-to-wall English/Spanish (TWI) versus specific types of intra-school tracking (Bilingual Education)
Regarding the othering - I don’t understand how closing Bessie Rhodes is a fix. You could perhaps argue, “Yes, we will close the School but also we’ve trained all our Principals in Spanish, half the teachers, and will meet the needs of those kids in every school.” But that’s not what is being suggested at all! I doubt the District could afford or implement that even if the Board wanted. You can read some of the implementation plans, none of them are particularly on that level.
Regarding the second point, Bessie Rhodes as a two way immersion school isn’t that old of an idea. The Board created it in 2017. Back then, Mr. Hernandez was a supporter of the approach. According to the Evanston Roundtable;
Sergio Hernandez said current research “tells us this is the best model, and we’ve seen results that this model has been incredibly successful.”
He said, “The framework – I would like to see it expand across the District. It’s a framework that our children need in the 21st Century in regards to acknowledging other perspectives and working collaboratively. It’s more than necessary to teach our children with a framework that encourages critical thinking and collaborative work and to think about how we can solve problems collaboratively.”
“It’s so exciting to hear that there will be wall-to-wall Two Way Immersion, with a Mandarin option and with global studies,” said Mr. Hernandez.
The story continues;
Mr. Hernandez encouraged parents at Bessie Rhodes, as well as those in the TWI program, to “work with us to ensure that this program meets all of your needs.”
Well that didn’t last long.
The Bessie Rhodes closure didn’t just come out of nowhere. It was originally part of the promise to be contained in the new Fifth Ward School and was removed from the school when the District sat on their hands for 18 months. In terms of raw building maintenance needs, it is pretty much middle of the pack for the District and it’s debatable how much revenue they can get from selling the property.3
So I’m just left scratching my head - what am I missing? It just seems like there is almost no upside to this entire thing. Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.
In other news on Cordogan-Clark…
Renderings were unveiled last night for the school.4 Sadly, I couldn’t make the meeting. However, I received a FOIA response with some of the Cordogan-Clark bills. It contains both work done on the fifth ward school and summer maintenance programs, including contractors. I wasn’t aware that Cordogan-Clark would actually pass through the full maintenance expenses (to individual contractors) through the billing. So I will have to issue a correction regarding the full architectural cost because it is most certainly less than what I wrote about previously.
The District provided a note in my request, which I think summarizes the numbers. I thank them for including this.
Please note the District 65 administration and school board are committed to making facility improvements to maintain a safe environment conducive to student learning. We are fully aware of the significant and longstanding capital needs across all 18 of our schools as identified in our 2022 Master Facility Plan and will continue to take steps in making the necessary improvements.
Cordogan Clark serves as the district’s Construction Manager on various capital projects, including summer work completed at nine schools in advance of the 2023-2024 school year. These projects were put out to bid in 2023 and included window replacement, asbestos abatement, ceiling and flooring replacement, and plumbing upgrades. Additionally, LED lighting upgrades were made at five of these schools. Bids were approved by the school board in March 2023.
Of the $6.9 million paid to Cordogan Clark in FY24, the vast majority of those payments were not for fees incurred by Cordogan Clark. Instead, as the District’s Construction Manager overseeing these various construction projects, the District pays Cordogan Clark and then Cordogan Clark pays the contractors that performed the work directly.
This will take some time for me to summarize, so stay tuned!
YouTube has a very useful automatic transcription function that you can turn on if you want to search through the video for certain keywords, etc. I’ve found this very helpful!
As a 40 year old male, late 1980s baseball was once my area of expertise. So, I’ve been trying to figure out which Keith he was referring to. The only 1980s Keith on the Cubs was Keith Moreland (aka “Zonk”) who played for the Cubs from 1982-87. He could also have been referring to the great Keith Hernandez, but he never played for the Cubbies.
Back during that era, I was obsessively a fan of Cecil Fielder and the Detroit Tigers.
The District’s documents cite a number around $5 million but I’ve heard numbers that range from $1m to $5m depending on land-use, rezoning, and if there is a buyer willing to take the existing structure.
This is an aesthetic choice but I like the designs.
Evanston should take linguistic diversity and its changing demographics seriously and commit to Bessie Rhodes, not shut it down. The equity grifters on the current school board don’t care about the benefits of early two-way immersion for all children, and are moving to shut down the District’s most innovative school rather than figure out how to expand its academic offerings.
I'm currently working on my dissertation on curriculum studies at Depaul. While I'm not a specialist in dual language education, I am a parent of two kids at Bessie Rhodes and did my homework going in. One of the really infuriating things here is that even a cursory glance at the education research via Google scholar reveals that a wall to wall TWI program is an order of magnitude more effective at meeting the needs of EL students, and their families. I cannot conceive of the level of mental gymnastics that Sergio is doing to convince himself that what they are doing by closing Bessie Rhodes will do anything other than decrease equity and inclusion for our Spanish speaking population.
Moreover, as you point out, everything about this closure is, charitably, "penny wise and Pound foolish." It feels a lot like when Daley was telling everyone how great selling off the parking rights in Chicago was going to be.