4 Scenarios Considered By District 65 Return To School Task Force

EVANSTON, IL — Evanston/Skokie School District 65 board members elected a new president and vice president last week, and the district's incoming superintendent discussed four potential reopening plans for the fall. Anya Tanyavutti was elected board president, and Biz Lindsay-Ryan was elected its new vice president. Both were unopposed and unanimously approved for the one-year board leadership term.

A newly formed Return to School Task Force of staff, parents and community members has begun crafting plans for each possible scenario, incoming Superintendent Devon Horton explained. A separate committee made up of teachers, staff and administrators is working on educational planning for each possible plan. The new task force met for the first time last week, according to district staff.

"We are currently in a state where we don't know what it's going to look like when we return to school," Horton said at the June 8 meeting. "We don't know if we're going to return earlier on the time we have scheduled or even later, but this task force will play a major role in bringing recommendations to the board so that we can decide — whatever choice we make — that we have a viable plan that has, 100 percent, the community voice involved in it."

Scenario A: Schools open with no contact limiting
In this scenario, which Horton said is unlikely in the near future, some students and staff with individual medical concerns may need additional accommodations, such as remote work.

Scenario B: Schools open with significant safety, hygiene and social distancing
Under this scenario, schools could have staggered arrival and dismissal schedules with a mix of in-person and remote learning, physical distancing in classrooms and no large gatherings.

Scenario C: Schools open for some students and staff with significant safety, hygiene and social distancing
Under this hybrid scenario, students' return would be prioritized based on age, academic standing, access to resources at home or other unique needs.

Scenario D: Schools remain closed and remote learning continues
District staff and a task force group are set to continue developing remote learning procedures, in part with the help of more than 4,500 responses to a recent survey on e-learning.

The district may also adopt a new calendar, with any one of the above scenarios. A list of the task force group participants and moderators is available on the district's website. The board also included updated committee appointments, curriculum and meeting dates, among other items on its end-of-the-year meeting agenda.

Joaquin Stephenson, the district's departing director of equity and family/community engagement, delivered an update on the district's equity professional learning. According to his memo to the board, the district held three Beyond Diversity training sessions for staff and one for parents before COVID-19 led to cancellations. There are 124 people currently in the district's SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity), Sprout and SEED En Espanol programs. And the district has completed LGBTQ+ gender identity training for all employees and completed the N-Word Orientation for 14 schools, while four schools missed out due to COVID-19.

A planned live speech with "White Fragility" author Robin DiAngelo was cancelled due to the pandemic, according to the memo. DiAngelo was interviewed Friday by Evanston Township High School Principal Marcus Campbell in a livestreamed event sponsored by the Family Action Network.

The meeting also featured statements (written versions included below video) from the outgoing Board President Suni Kartha, a board member since May 2013 and president since April 2017, and incoming Board President Anya Tanyavutti, a member since October 2016 and the outgoing vice president.

Outgoing Board President Suni Kartha's written remarks:

At the risk of sounding cliche, the last 3 years serving as president of the District 65 board of education have been simultaneously the most challenging, sometimes the most frustrating, and without question the most rewarding experience of my professional life. I want to take a few moments to celebrate some of what we have accomplished over the last 3 years. During this time, we took the district’s stated commitment to equity to the next level - adopting a comprehensive racial equity policy, making racial equity trainings a mandatory requirement for employment in this district or serving on this board, and formalizing through policy the use of a racial equity impact assessment tool for all board-level decision-making. We also encouraged and supported our administrators in making racial equity trainings available to our community partners and parents, which I believe has been instrumental in moving forward some long needed equity conversations within our district (such as conversations being facilitated by the PTA Equity Project) as well as in increasing support for (and reducing opposition to) much needed equity measures in our larger community, such as the city council vote in favor of reparations. We used the findings of a racial equity audit to take action on eliminating tracking in 8th grade algebra and to enhance our capacity to serve Spanish- speaking emergent bilinguals in TWI classrooms. We expanded our gender policy, to be more inclusive of students and staff who identify as non-binary, and, albeit not without some timing issues, set in motion the creation of student and staff administrative procedures to better support our gender expansive community. We revamped our dress code policy, largely in response to calls from our students highlighting the racial disparities in enforcement, and rewrote our discipline policy to reflect our commitment to restorative practices and to ending the school-to-prison pipeline. Something that feels particularly resonant in this moment, we pushed for a rethinking of the SRO relationship with the Evanston Police Department, to limit it to an adult-based relationship focused on true emergency planning, while we urged our administrative team to provide alternative supports for students in crisis, which led to increasing the number of school-based staff trained in de-escalation techniques and the creation of school and district response teams to provide developmentally appropriate supports to students in crisis. Using collaborative, interest-based bargaining, we negotiated 2 long-term contracts with our largest collective bargaining units, educators and paraprofessionals, that honor the work and expertise that they bring to their jobs every day, while staying within the district’s reasonable financial projections. And, as an extra bonus, I’m told that this was the first time in many, many years that bargaining successfully concluded prior to the end of the school year! We have worked within the finance committee and with the business office to adopt a racial equity lens in budgeting, so that we can preserve our referendum dollars and plan for long-term financial stability while maintaining our commitment to enhancing the experience of our black and brown students and to reducing the gap in opportunity to achieve. And we oversaw an expansive and inclusive, superintendent search process that engaged over 1000 community and staff members, modeled the use of a racial equity lens, and resulted in our hire of a dynamic, passionate, and bold leader whose values, experience, and vision are exactly what we need to help us reach this board’s and our community’s goal of creating safe, inclusive, equitable schools that support the learning and growth of our students and eliminate the racial predictability in student outcomes.

As important as it is to celebrate our accomplishments, and I know that there are certainly many that I forgot to mention, it is also important to understand that there is still much work to do. Especially at this moment in time, when many of us are attending rallies and wearing t- shirts or holding signs that emphatically proclaim that Black Lives Matter, we need to reflect on what we are doing to give those words meaning, so that they are more than just words. Each one of us has a role in dismantling anti-black institutional racism, and for black lives to matter in our schools, we must center the needs of black children and families. To my board colleagues, we must reflect on how we adopt policy, on whose voices we hear and how we ensure that we are not implementing policy directed at historically marginalized groups, but rather are including those groups in the planning. For our administrators and staff, this means reflecting every day on how our biases inform our practices, continuing to use the racial equity impact assessment tool as a check against those biases, and authentically inviting the expertise of each other as colleagues and collaborators, always keeping the academic and social-emotional needs of students, particularly black students, at the center. For our union leadership teams, this means reflecting on the important historical role that unions have played in bringing about change but also in hindering it, so that your organizations can lean into the former and honestly scrutinize the latter. And for our parents, this means reflecting on how we advocate for our children and recognizing that being anti-racist means accepting that programs and practices that our data proves to us is harming black and brown students must be changed, even if we perceive those programs and practices as benefiting our own children.

And I just want to give a special recognition and thanks to our students. Our students really do regularly show us how amazing they are. From the Concerning Foster performance a few months ago, to the rallies and discussions that young people are organizing right now to support black lives and advocate for police reforms, they are showing up and they are giving me hope and inspiring me to do better every day. I encourage our board and our incoming superintendent to really think intentionally this year of how we can engage these young voices in our anti-racist work.

I step down tonight as board president feeling grateful to have worked alongside this most amazing group of board colleagues. Working with all of you these last 3 years has been such an incredible experience and I cannot express how remarkable a group of people you all are, and how extraordinary it is to think about all that we have accomplished together. None of this would have been possible without each one of you. I am so grateful to be able to continue this work with you for another year. And I am so grateful and honored to have shared this leadership journey with Anya Tanyavutti, one of the most intelligent, compassionate, and forceful advocates I have ever worked with. Her support of me, as well as her challenging me when my ideas and assumptions needed to be challenged, made me a better leader. And I can think of no better time than right now, when our community needs strong black voices to guide our work, to be welcoming one of the best as our new board president. I know our board and district will continue to do great things under her leadership.

Incoming Board President AnyaTanyavutti's written remarks:

Thank you to my Board colleagues and to the D65 community that we represent. It’s an honor and a privilege to have served in Board Leadership for the past 3 year with you Suni, and a true honor to now step into the Presidency role, Suni it was an honor to be your VP and you were an outstanding Board President in unprecedented times. I'm grateful for your continued presence on the Board. And Biz, thank you so much for joining me in Board leadership, we are so fortunate to benefit from your gifts and talents. I’m grateful too, to Heidi and Phil to have had the opportunity to work closely with you this past year, an interim year, like no other, I'm certain. Thank you all for your phenomenal commitment to D65 and I am so excited to welcome Dr. Horton! You have cued up a powerful launching pad for your leadership and we are so excited to welcome you officially as our next Superintendent starting June 18! Lastly, thank you also to everyone's families for sharing us with D65, and to mine for sharing me- our families too, are engaged in service to our community. I am so proud of the groundbreaking, child and family-centered racial equity policy making that has guided this Board. I value each of our lived experiences, talents and contributions and am excited for the meaningful, and without a doubt, at times difficult work that lays ahead.

I have been saddened of late, heavy and tired with grief and fear, by the state sanctioned violence that we see being enacted across our nation. I am proud of the global throngs of communities, including our own, organizing themselves to bravely engage in mutual aid, and stand up and demand more humane and just treatment, through reforms and abolition policies and demands for investment in community. The past two weeks as a Black woman, a black mother...I’ve felt pained. I believe strongly, and I sit here because I believe, our children deserve a more healed, more sustainable, more empathetic, and loving world. They deserve to live in a world free from barbarism, in a world where there is no question if their lives matter. And right now, that is NOT the case. But it CAN be. While I’ve held grief for Ahmaud Aubrey, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the thousands that have come before them and even since- so much grief and fear, and rage, it's paralyzing at times. I also, feel hope that Change Gon Come, because we are the descendants of the UNDEFEATED- because of that, I know we will persevere with love for one another, with vision for our children’s future, with imagination and with fervor for our community.

While I grieve the error of this country and the conscience of everyone who has been and continues to be complicit in its genocide of the indigenous and kidnapped African captives who have built it and whose descendants still reside. I grieve, yet, “still I rise”. Still, we are here. I speak up and I stand up because we deserve also to be served and seen. We are not diversity accessories, and our suffering is not background noise.

An excerpt from Maya Angelou's still I rise says:

"Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise."

Look at the composition of this Board and our District Administrative team- WE RISE! I once was a child in a district much like D65 in demographic climate and culture- my aptitude to lead and learn was neglected and I had no models in my school district to envision myself in the seat that you all have voted me into. It was not until my departure to an explicitly racist school district to a gifted program, that my learning was invested in, to the negligence, however, of my emotional safety. No family or child should have to make such choices between learning and physical or emotional safety. I am committed to leading with a value for academic rigor for every child, and holistic learning, and I can do that confidently, because those are the values of this Board. My hope is that we lead in a way that ensures every child has the academic and emotional readiness to take any of our seats down the line and 30 years from now when they do, they will be maintaining justice rather than fighting to build it.

So it is with humility, and on the shoulders of my ancestors, and many bold voices that came before me, that I step into this role, on behalf of the entire D65 community. What I can continue to promise to you, Board colleagues and D65 community, is a continued commitment to transparency and inclusivity, and to not let our foot off the gas. As unrest has spread across our nation, it is clear we need our commitment to racial justice now and the power of making policy with individuals full humanity in mind,more than ever. It’s a misnomer that talking about race is divisive. Remaining in disconsciousness about race is a truly divisive and violent practice, that we are seeing the consequences for today. So we will continue in this work! Thank you, colleagues, for your trust and collaboration. Together we will do big things for the children and families of D65, in collaboration with the knowledge and wisdom of our stakeholders.

With much gratitude. Let’s go D65! Let’s link arms, and move forward in community for a just and equitable future!

Not read, but written:

A young Aboriginal woman from Australia reminded me of this quote that Frantz Fanon said, "Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it." We've discovered ours, and we seek to fulfill it. In doing that, we will provide the equitable educational environment to allow our community of children and families to do the same.