The Evanston/Skokie School District 65 Board of Education unanimously approved cutting $13.3 million in expenses at its Monday meeting to balance the district’s budget for the 2024-2025 school year. The plan will eliminate 73 jobs, including 18 teacher positions.
The teacher cuts will be spread across the district, but the district is not yet identifying which schools will lose which teachers. The district will also cut 26 jobs in the central office and 29 non-classroom jobs.
The district has 10 elementary schools, three middle schools, two magnet schools (with one, Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies, slated to close) and three education centers, according to its website.
The reductions will take place on June 30—July 1, the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year.
The cuts have been looming since the Board approved the budget for the school year in September. Superintendent Angel Turner said at that time the Board needed to cut $13.2 million in expenses before the end of the school year to balance its budget. The district’s financial consultant said that it was the district’s third consecutive year with a deficit greater than $10 million. He also warned the district could be eligible to be taken over by the state unless it put its financial house in order.
Despite the budget cuts, construction at Foster School, the district’s only school in Evanston’s historically Black Fifth Ward, is still underway. The construction group managing the project gave an update to the Board on Monday, and while one bid came in at $117,000 more than originally expected, other bids came in lower and offset that increase.
Construction at the school has been a touchy subject for some in the district. Board members refused to seriously consider pausing construction to restructure payments for construction in October. The construction manager said pausing construction would cause the cost of construction to go up.
At Monday’s meeting, the Board deliberated the final proposal for about an hour after a presentation from the administration and a consultant.
“There’s nothing to celebrate in this,” said Board Member Elisabeth “Biz” Lindsay-Ryan. “These are real people that really serve our district well, and it’s a loss for all of us collectively, but also individually.”
Board Member Soo La Kim said she agreed with Lindsay-Ryan’s opinion. “It has been a service-rich and curriculum-rich district. We’re trying to preserve as much that rich curricular experience as possible, but it does come with a lot of pain in other areas,” she said.
Turner said the impact of the 26 job cuts in the district’s central offices will be felt mostly by staff.
“The white glove service that we use to provide — that won’t exist anymore,” Turner said. “We have to start to be realistic with folks on how things are going to look for us moving forward.”
Per the district’s analysis, the cuts will affect students minimally to moderately. The district rated each cut on a scale from one to three. They considered cuts with a one score to be minimal impact and cuts graded three to have a high impact. The staff impact was scored at 1.2, and the student impact was scored at 1.6.
Earlier in January, the administration offered the board four options on how to balance the district’s budget. The options called for the Board to make at least $15 million in cuts, a larger cut than first proposed by Turner.
After the options were unveiled, the district held three public community engagement meetings to get feedback, primarily from parents and community members. The feedback led the administration to water down the proposal, and cut 18 teachers, instead of 22 as originally suggested. As a result of the feedback, transportation cuts were not made to pre-K, Turner said.
Further cuts, which could result in school closures and further layoffs and transportation cuts could be announced through June 2026, per the plan.
At one of the January community meetings, the district’s Chief Financial Officer Tamara Mitchell said just how close the district was from being taken over by the state.
Mitchell said a pending audit from an independent agency is projected to rank the district as being under financial warning, one ranking above being under financial watch. School districts under the financial watch ranking are at greater risk of being taken over by the state, she said.
