Sizing up District 65 compared with peers around Cook County

How have the recent losses in enrollment in Evanston/Skokie School District 65 compared with those of similar districts throughout Cook County? And how does the district’s spending on administration and teaching staff size up to that of peer districts?

The Roundtable investigated these and other related questions based on the Illinois State Board of Education’s (ISBE) “Illinois Report Card” data from the end of the 2022-2023 school year, finding that within a cohort of 13 other similar Cook County districts, District 65 had the:

• highest per-pupil spending at $25,078;
• steepest percentage drop in student enrollment over the past five years at 20.5%;
• highest average teacher salary at $89,418;
• lowest student-to-teacher ratio at 12-to-1;
• second-highest average administrator salary at $141,730; and,
• by a significant amount, the lowest student-to-administrator ratio, at 93-to-1.

We explored these variables against the backdrop of independent financial consultant Robert Grossi’s recent findings that District 65 needs to permanently cut, next year, between $5 million and $6 million of its approximately $166 million budget. Otherwise, the district will add to a deficit projected to reach $14.5 million by 2029, as funds from the 2017 referendum – when 80% of voters supported an additional $14.5 million in taxes – run out. 

Grossi also found that, while higher inflation rates have played a significant role in the widening budget chasm, another factor is that the district has lost more than 1,400 students in the past five years while adding more than 200 full-time staff. 

“There’s been a lot of growth in the budget,” Grossi told the school board. “We have to look at what’s caused that growth. Some of that stuff’s controllable. Some of that stuff’s not controllable.”

Grossi’s recommendations centered on “right sizing” staff to be more congruent with declining student enrollment, as well as considering potential school closures. He noted that the sale of buildings and grounds could help fund the estimated $188 million in repairs needed at school buildings across the district between now and 2030; the sale of Bessie Rhodes will bring an estimated $5 million, according to former District 65 Chief Financial Officer Raphael Obafemi.

The district will present the first phase of its budget reduction plan focused on administrative reductions at a Finance Committee meeting on April 15.

Methodology for selecting comparable districts

To compare and contrast the enrollment losses, administrative and teaching costs, and other variables as tracked by ISBE, the RoundTable chose 13 “comp” K-8 districts from suburban areas of Cook County that most closely match District 65 in terms of the population they serve, including overall size of student body as well as racial and income demographics.

Finding matches across these control variables began with the list of large K-8 districts, as labeled by the ISBE, roughly those 1,500 students and higher, which the RoundTable narrowed down by removing districts that did not at least somewhat resemble Evanston’s diversity – mostly taking out districts that were largely either white and higher-income or minority and lower-income. We selected these comp districts based on size and demographics before looking at any other data, to avoid bias and ensure a “blindfolded taste test,” so to speak.

Out of the entire list of 14 school districts, District 65 stood out on a number of fronts in 2022-23, the most recent figures available from ISBE, which were released last fall. (See table for details.) The district was the second largest overall (6,316 students), had the second-largest total budget ($182.9 million), and the highest per-pupil spending ($25,078). District 65 had the second-lowest percentage of low-income students (39.6%, behind only Oak Park ESD97), the third-highest percentage of Black students (23.0%), and the highest percentage of students eligible for homeless assistance (4.4%). The district was about average in terms of its population of Hispanic students, English-language learners, those with IEPs and those who had moved over the course of the school year.

Highest enrollment drop

On the enrollment front, District 65 had the most precipitous percentage drop of any of the 14 districts over the past five years, at 20.5%. Elk Grove District 59 had the second-highest loss, down 17.7%, followed by Indian Springs District 109, down 14.4%. The statewide average for enrollment was down 7.2% from 2018. Cook County lost about 25,000 people out of its population of about five million just last year.

Evanston/Skokie also experienced the second-largest drop in the number of Black students from 2018 to 2023, at 18.5%, behind only Midlothian District 143, at 23.6%. District 65 tied for the second-largest drop in Hispanic students, at 16.1%, the same as Skokie District 68 and less than only Elk Grove, which lost 17.9%. The loss of white students in District 65 was even higher, at 24.7%, although that was closer to the median across the cohort of districts. The statewide average losses were 11.2%, 8.8% and 2.5%, respectively, for white, Black and Hispanic students.

Board President Sergio Hernandez and and board member Joey Hailpern, Finance Committee chair, said they were not surprised that District 65’s enrollment drops were larger than those of similar districts throughout the county, and they had a few possible explanations as to why – including the district’s pandemic policies, the rising cost of living in Evanston and the relative value families feel that they are getting from the district itself.

“For the past couple of years, [the district] has been actively reaching out to families who may have transferred their children out to private schools during the pandemic, as a result of the pandemic and our pandemic policies,” Hernandez said. “We’ve been taking an active role in trying to start recruiting back the families who have left us.”

By way of comparison, District 65 partially reopened for in-person learning in February 2021 and fully reopened in August 2021, when ISBE made it a statewide requirement; masking was made optional in August 2022. In Skokie District 68, partial reopening occurred in August 2020, with a full reopening in April 2021, and masking became optional in February 2022, when Gov. JB Pritzker made it optional statewide indoors. In Evergreen Park District 124, students had the option to attend in-person from the get-go, as long as their parents or guardians approved, while masking became optional in February 2022 as well. Oak Park District 97 reopened on the identical track to District 65, although it became mask-optional in March 2022.

Cost-of-living challenge

In terms of the affordability issue, anecdotally, the board is aware of Hispanic, Black and working-class white families who have left for places like Skokie – or even as far as Wisconsin – “because it’s affordable to live there vs. the increase in cost of living [in Evanston] and lack of affordable housing,” Hernandez said. He added that the district would like to work with the City of Evanston and other institutions to address that issue as well as building “wraparound services for families, which may involve, perhaps, housing stipends or mental health services.”

According to Zillow, Evanston’s average home value is slightly to significantly higher than many of the comp areas, at $402,000, although values have risen more slowly in the past year, up 2.9%. Oak Park had an average value of $391,000, up 4.3%; Skokie, $357,000, up 6.7%; Palatine, $311,000, up 9.6%; Des Plaines, $293,000, up 9.1%; Evergreen Park, $251,000, up 3.7%; and Alsip, $230,000, up 3.8%. Zillow’s figures are by municipality, not district, however, so the overlap is imprecise; Evanston’s figures would not include “Skevanston,” the area just south of Golf Road and west of McCormick Boulevard, for example.

Hailpern agreed the pandemic and cost of living have played a role. 

“A lot of the districts have had a decline; we’ve had a steep decline,” he said. “It’s leaving after the pandemic, it’s the cost of living and it’s also the goods. And we have to be honest about that. When I was growing up, my dad always said, ‘We have the choice between sending you to a religious school or a public school,’ but the public schools were not to be competed with, they were so good. 

“One of the things we need to improve is the way people feel about their public schools. There’s definitely a debate about that that exists, that I think we have to own and be real about,” he added. “When people feel good about their public schools, not only will they send them there, but they will support them; they will support the cost of the child’s experience. But until we get to that place, there’s always going to be those questions.”

Economic issues have hit families across the board, and the district needs to work harder to ensure that its tax levies do not continue to contribute to a rising cost of living, Hailpern said. 

“Part of that also is us, as a district, living with our means, so that we’re not constantly doing the year-over-year levy like we did this year, which is a 5% levy – that’s a serious tax increase,” he said. “That cannot be ignored. And when the economy is hitting the way that it is, it’s good for schools because we can levy – but that doesn’t mean we should. And we really need to find a way to not let that be a runaway train for costs that are beyond what is needed to do a good job.” The district raised taxes by 5% last year as well, and both votes were unanimous.

Hannah Schmid, policy analyst at the Illinois Policy Institute, said districts that have lost significant population should be investigating the cause – whether it’s just natural population declines or an out-migration to private schools or other areas. 

“The next question is, what can we do to make the public school a better option for these families, if families are choosing other options?” she said. “Especially in a place like District 65 that’s facing dire financial choices.” 

Andrea Infante-Martinez, a Bessie Rhodes parent and executive director of Puerta Abierta Preschool in southeast Evanston, said she’s “shocked” by the level of enrollment drops in District 65, because most families at her dual-language preschool at least initially want to continue in the district’s Two-Way Immersion (TWI) program.

But Infante-Martinez is aware of Hispanic families who have moved out of Evanston to places like Gurnee or Waukegan in search of cheaper housing, including people who, like herself, grew up in Evanston. She also knows of families who began home-schooling their kids, sometimes in small-group arrangements with other families, during the pandemic and have continued with that model. “Between that and the cost of living, it’s drawn families away,” she said.

Infante-Martinez said she and her husband are considering taking their son out of Bessie Rhodes, where he’s now a third-grader, and putting him in private school. 

“I don’t want to. I like the TWI program. The teachers are great,” she said. “It comes from administration. Going through all these principals and staff, poor communications from the administration, especially the news of them closing [Bessie Rhodes], not knowing what the plan is.”

A District 65 “ex-pat” parent and former longtime district employee who asked to remain anonymous said she moved due to pandemic policies and because District 65’s recent financial woes made her question the worth of paying a premium to live in Evanston. 

“I didn’t feel the money we were going to invest in a house and taxes was going to go to my kids,” she said. 

Adult-to-student ratios

District 65 also stands out among the 13 other districts in several areas of its budget and administration, with the highest average teacher salary, lowest student-to-teacher ratio, second-highest average administrator salary and lowest student-to-administrator ratio, the latter by a significant amount. 

The average teacher salary ($89,418) was only slightly above Wheeling CCSD21 ($89,039) and Elk Grove ($86,819); the student-to-teacher ratio (12-to-1) came closest to Alsip/Hazelgreen/Oak Lawn (13.5-to-1) as well as Elk Grove and Oak Park (each 14.9-to-1). The statewide average is 17.1-to-1. The district is closer to the middle on teacher retention (89.3%) and percent of its budget spent on instruction (49.3%).

The average administrator salary of $141,730 was behind only Skokie ($155,535) and slightly ahead of Indian Springs ($137,231) and Wheeling ($135,245). Ultimately, though, District 65 was the biggest outlier in terms of student-to-administrator ratio, at 93-to-1. The closest comparisons were Midlothian (106-to-1) and Elk Grove (110-to-1); seven others were between 114-to-1 and 132-to-1, and Oak Lawn was the highest at 198-to-1. The statewide average was 141-to-1. Overall, the district’s administration has grown from 46 full time employees in the 2018-2019 school year to 60 in 2022-2023.

At a Finance Committee meeting on March 11, then-interim Superintendent Angel Turner (named permanent superintendent at a board meeting a week later) presented three strategies to meet the district’s budget shortfall: “right-sizing” staffing levels across departments to better match current student enrollment, creating operational efficiencies by “reimagining” some non-teaching staff roles and slowing the growth rate of expenditures outside of personnel.

District spokesperson Melissa Messinger responded to requests for an interview with Turner with written responses, which read, in part: “[W]e recognize the need to ‘right size’ our district in more ways than one. Following the pandemic, our students returned to in-person learning with significant academic and social emotional needs.” 

Grant funding enabled the district to launch several academic and social-emotional learning programs that increased staffing, and the district retained teaching staff despite declining enrollment, she wrote. 

“We are not running the most efficient organizational structure with a number of our buildings being significantly underutilized,” Messinger added. “In looking at these peer districts, it seems as though our District also operates the highest number of schools given the student population and size of our geographic area. This also impacts our administrator-to-student ratios in comparison to other districts. As communicated, it will be necessary to develop a building consolidation plan in Phase II of our budget reduction planning.”

Hailpern noted that Turner referenced the student-to-administrator ratio at the Finance Committee meeting. 

“That’s being targeted as we look to the cuts that are coming this year,” he said. “We’ve had leadership change over the past couple of years, going from Dr. Goren, to interim superintendents, to Dr. Horton, to Dr. Turner. That doesn’t bode well for sustainability, and consistency in staffing. … It makes things harder. I’m looking for consistency down the road, so that we can, certainly, get some of those things in line with our neighbors.”

In doing so, Hailpern said the board needs to consider the district’s ability to recruit and retain staff in high-need positions like bilingual and special education. “Not to relate people to commodities, but the environment changes based on the markets around us, and we have to find a way to be competitive to recruit and attract the right people,” he said.

‘Long-term conversation’

Hernandez said the board needs to be mindful of serving populations like low-income families, multilingual English learners and special education students. “Those are our priorities, and again, we really want, as Joey mentioned, to be competitive, ensuring that we attain and retain those folks in those types of positions,” he said.

The two board members both see any teacher reductions as tied to future conversations about consolidating and closing school buildings, and both said they aim to make any such reductions through attrition and retirements, and only as needed to account for a shrinking student population. 

Turner said at the March 11 Finance Committee meeting that the second phase of the district’s budget reduction plan, addressing these issues, will commence at the start of the 2024-25 school year. (District 65 teachers union President Trisha Baker did not make herself available for an interview.)

“The reality of declining enrollment, and the number of buildings we have, puts us in a situation that obviously needs adjustment,” Hailpern said. “The shifts that will happen when the Fifth Ward school opens, and the new student assignments go into effect, is going to change the student populations at several buildings, assuming that students come to their neighborhood, walkable school. And that’s going to create the next conversation about possible consolidation of school communities, possible school closures. … But that’s a much bigger, long-term conversation.”

Hernandez said the board wants to be thoughtful about reductions in ways that “protect the classrooms, and students … in particular, our most marginalized student populations, as best as possible. So again, our broader goals in regards to our budget reduction plans includes a focus on some of our processes, contracts, all of these other pieces, that we could save quite a bit of money from. … If there’s teacher positions to be eliminated, it would be ones that are currently vacant, or through attrition, or through retirements.”

Hailpern added that he’s “hoping” to avoid any large-scale “reduction-in-force” layoffs in order to meet the demands of the district’s budget reduction plan.

Admin and teacher reductions

Schmid said she finds it “interesting” that the administration size hasn’t yet been adjusted to enrollment declines but also wonders whether District 65 could work to reverse those declines. 

“You never want to see a district have to make big cuts to right-size that staff, adjusting to enrollment,” she said. “How do we attract students who are leaving?”

The district should go easy on reducing the teaching staff, if possible, despite the budget scenario, according to Schmid. 

“The biggest focus for the district should be: What are the things to implement that could increase student proficiency and be a good place for teachers to be employed, and engage families the way public schools should?” she said. 

To the extent budget cuts are needed, “We are looking at administrative costs as the biggest concern,” Schmid said, adding that Grossi’s report also identified transportation savings, in part from switching away from the use of taxis to transport individual students. Overall transportation costs mushroomed to $10 million in 2023, well above a previous all-time high of $6 million. 

Puerta Abierta director Infante-Martinez believes the central administration should be reduced but would “hate to see teachers being laid off,” she said. “I haven’t seen a change in quality” with more administrators. “I don’t know, half the time, what’s going on in the school. The principal and administrative staff are constantly changing. The communication piece needs work as well.”

The “ex-pat” parent and former employee who asked to remain anonymous said the district needs to address the student dropoff by eliminating and consolidating positions, ideally more among administrators than teachers. “I also would like the district to do an analysis of those [staff] like me, who left, and either were not replaced, or were replaced with people with much lower salaries,” she said. “What does it say when people leave to take pay cuts? … And I think the community needs to speak up more, and not only when your own kid is affected.”

Consolidating buildings

The “comp” figures from ISBE showed that District 65 has the second-largest number of school buildings of the 14 districts, at 16 – 10 elementaries, three middle-schools, two K-8 schools and the Joseph E. Hill Education Center, where pre-K is held and the central office is headquartered. Only Palatine District 15 has more buildings, at 19, but only Palatine has more students.

In terms of average students per building, Evanston-Skokie is somewhere in the middle of the pack, at 395, with the cohort of districts ranging between 301 in Alsip/Hazelgreen/Oaklawn and 634 in Homewood.

In any case, Hailpern said he believes this comparison is also useful when making longer-term decisions about how to right-size District 65, “not that I’m setting a goal based on other neighborhoods. 

“We have two K-8 schools. We have five places for middle school learning to happen. And they’re old buildings too. So, as we look to make some new learning spaces, there’s certainly an opportunity there to bring some things in line, in terms of the big footprint of the district and how much that costs to sustain.”

Both Hailpern and Hernandez said that paring down the central administration needs to come first. “These things should not be on the table all at once,” Hailpern said. “There is a specific lens toward administrative cuts, and making sure that we are protecting what’s in the classroom and teaching positions.”

“We are going to look at [administrative] positions, but separately from the school consolidation,” Hernandez said. “Any administrator at a building or central office level that is making a positive impact for our most marginalized populations, students who have IEPs [individualized education programs], students who have special education needs, kids who have free and reduced lunch needs … as we evaluate what positions to keep at all levels, we want to make sure that we link those to student success, and specifically for our most marginalized student population.”

As a principal for 15 years, Hailpern said he “might have different answers” than Hernandez about administrative reductions. “Legally, we need to have a principal in every building. We legally need to have a CSBO [chief school business officer] and a superintendent. And that’s where I’ll leave that,” he said.

Hailpern believes District 65 will sort out its right-sizing dilemma over time. “We are closing a school, and building a school, and going through leadership change,” he said. “And there’s absolutely a burn rate that comes with that because change costs money. And that’s a problem. We need some stability so that we can refine and streamline the work amongst the teams. And people can rely on each other differently than they can when things are in flux.”

Messinger expressed similar confidence. “Our efforts to reduce our budget and ‘right size’ will consider staffing as it relates to student enrollment and learning needs; creating operational efficiencies for effective service delivery; and optimizing our district footprint with a focus on walkable, neighborhood schools,” she wrote. “We must also consider our central office and administration, which has much higher admin-to-student ratios than our peer districts.”

The value of comps

Going forward, both Hailpern and Hernandez agreed that District 65 should benchmark its progress against similar districts. “Comps are important because when you see things working, you want it,” Hailpern said. “It doesn’t make what we’re doing here any easier, because we have to get there. And I think what I want for the district is a place we’re not at yet. So the comps are essential. … I just want to know what’s working, and how do we get more of that?” 

“It’s elevating some best practices that we can, among peers, share, and implement in our own way. Because situations are all unique at school districts. Our environments are different; our political climate is different,” Hernandez added. “We utilize all of these perspectives to try to help with our deliberation and decision-making, as school board members, to ultimately try to create a school district environment for our children and families that benefit them in the long run.”

Schmid would encourage such benchmarking. “I definitely think it’s important for districts,” she said. “It’s obviously important to see differences in teacher salaries and administrative costs, especially when you see districts with bloated administrations and declining enrollment.”