Protesters gathered outside the Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies at around 4:30 p.m. on Oct. 28, demonstrating against the District 65 school board’s plans at the time to shut down the seventh and eighth grades at the school in November. The shouting voices of small children overlaid the gathered adults’ signs, bearing phrases like “Fix This” and “Support Bessie Rhodes.” At about 4:47 p.m., the group began a march in the direction of the Joseph E. Hill Education Center, where the board was holding a meeting, and as the procession continued, the young voices congealed into cries of “Save Bessie Rhodes!”
Bessie Rhodes School is currently facing permanent closure at the end of the 2025-2026 school year, in a bid by the district to remove the expenses of running multiple schools (and providing upkeep on Bessie Rhodes) while they face several million dollars in deficits. The board intended the grade closures as a response to a dearth of available teachers at Bessie Rhodes, and planned to assign students in those grades to different middle schools in the area for the remainder of the year. (Sources vary on the reasons for the lack of teachers, attributing it to factors that range from low pay to difficulties produced by the expansion of the dual-language program.) In the time following the protest, a District 65 survey of 36 Bessie Rhodes families shows that about 58.33% of respondents would most wish for their children to keep attending the school, which would be employing District 65 administrators as teachers. The second-most favored option, with about 27.78% of respondents calling it their first choice, was to shift all seventh and eighth graders to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Literary and Fine Arts School.
In 2022, the board authorized a plan to create a new school building, Foster School, in Evanston’s Fifth Ward, housing students from a number of different District 65 schools. Bessie Rhodes students were to occupy one portion of the facility, in what was referred to as a “school within a school.” The following year, in October, the board found that their proposal would exceed their budget by $25 million. In response, they switched in January 2024 to a plan for a school housing only students in kindergarten through fifth grade, as opposed to the school’s current K-8 enrollment. As a result, at the end of the 2025–2026 school year, the current Bessie Rhodes building would have been shuttered.
This has led to concern among many over losing the sole “wall-to-wall” two-language program in District 65: instructors use both English and Spanish to lead classes. School board president Sergio Hernandez has claimed this need not be a concern. Multiple Hispanic and Latinx community members have decried the closure of the school as a disservice to their communities.
At the Oct. 28 protest, Stephanie Roache, whose son is in eighth grade at Bessie Rhodes, claimed that leaders in the district had failed to properly connect with the community regarding their decisions. She described Sergio Hernandez, the president of the District 65 School Board, as “not at all communicative,” and said that families had heard “nothing until we got an email that said ‘We’re closing grades November 17, and we’ll send you your school assignments.’” (Other sources have said that the email in question specified Nov. 15 as the last day of the seventh and eighth grades.)
When asked if there was anything the district could do to build back the trust they had lost from the school community, Roache responded simply: “No.”
Rahim Branch, a parent of a kindergartener and third grader at Bessie Rhodes, said that the announcement of the decision to close the seventh and eighth grades had disturbed him, after two previous years of hearing about the school potentially being closed. “My initial thought was that I wasn’t so sure that the whole school was going to make it throughout the entire year.” When asked if he thought the protesters might still be able to prevent Bessie Rhodes from being closed entirely, Branch said that “the chances just seem very slim, now, at this point. They already broke ground with the new school, and there’s a deficit, so it just seems like it’s very hard to go back now and redo things.”
In a copy of the talking points from her comments at the Oct. 28 board meeting, provided to North Star News, board member Soo La Kim stated that communication had not gone as it should have, and that in its decision to close the two grades, the board had sought simply to deal with the lack of teachers, rather than injure the community. She went on to write that none of the ideas for responding to the shortage was the most preferable, and that the board had tried to do what was best for students’ educations.
Skokie Mayor George Van Dusen, who joined Evanston’s Mayor Daniel Biss in writing a letter to the District 65 school board urging them to reconsider the decision to close the two grades, pointed out that the goings-on at Bessie Rhodes do have an effect on the Village of Skokie: part of the village lies within District 65, and some Skokie children attend Bessie Rhodes.
Mayor Van Dusen expressed faith in the board having good intentions, and sympathized with the monetary situation which had led them to close the school in the first place. At the same time, however, he expressed concern about the impact of their plan on Bessie Rhodes students: “These are young people, and their lives are being disrupted by the school being closed, period, but at least let them get the school year completed, so that they’ll have the summer to get adjusted.”
The mayor stated that he was continuing to communicate with Bessie Rhodes parents and with Mayor Biss. “If something comes up that I think warrants my attention,” he said, “I won’t hesitate.”
A note to readers: This story has been updated to include a more precise starting time for the march to the Joseph E. Hill education center. It was previously indicated to be around 4:50 p.m.
