Word: evanston
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...plan. In 1975 he presided over the closing of three elementary schools. "You don't make friends closing schools," he says. Parents and teachers quickly organized to fight for the schools on Hill's new list. Throughout January and February, during the coldest and snowiest winter in Evanston's history, while most restaurants were empty and movie theaters closed for lack of audiences, the evening school-board meetings were crowded with 400 or 500 people, all eager to be heard...
...candles, a parent read a statement foretelling the death of a school because the board had marked the principal for dismissal. Other nights featured debates pitting blacks against whites, those who valued music instruction against those who wanted foreign languages. It was neighborhood against neighborhood, teachers against administration, north Evanston vs. south Evanston. "We may have generated more hostility and more unfulfilled expectations by opening debate than if we had never asked for opinions," says Board Member Mary Anne Wexler, who like many others on the board began to feel worn out and put upon as the months of combat...
...subsided in early March, when the board completed a long series of votes altering Hill's complicated plan. Unlike many school districts around the country, Evanston had no real problem schools that could be easily pruned away with general approval and perhaps relief. There had to be more losers than winners. One winner was Willard School, a 40-year-old building that Hill at first marked for closing because of its relatively high maintenance costs. Willard parents mounted an effective Save-Our-School campaign...
...auditorium. But parents of two handicapped children filed suit to prevent removal of special orthopedic facilities established at Kingsley. The cost to refit another school with such facilities may be as much as $200,000. By a 4-to-3 vote, the board persevered in closing Kingsley, a north Evanston school, and then found itself compelled by a sense of equity to scrap a plan to keep a Skokie elementary school open one more year (a portion of Skokie village is in District 65). And so it went...
Wounds left over from Evanston's bitter integration battles of the '60s were opened again. With some evidence, a number of people believed the board had favored keeping schools open in predominantly white neighborhoods, placing an unfair burden on the black and integrated neighborhoods. Adding to the pain was the board's decision to transfer the nationally acclaimed Martin Luther King Jr. Laboratory School, which draws the best students from all over the district, to another building and sell the old Foster School building, which for more than 60 years had been the focal point of black...