New Name, Mascot Needed For 5th Ward School Ahead Of Groundbreaking

EVANSTON, IL — Ahead of groundbreaking on the site of the new public elementary school in the 5th Ward, officials in Evanston-Skokie School District 65 are convening a special committee to come up with a name and a mascot for the school.

The new K-5 school will be located at the northeast corner of Simpson Street and Ashland Avenue with room for 600 students. It will return a neighborhood school to a historically Black part of town that has not had one since the closure of Foster School in 1967 during the district's desegregation efforts.

Earlier this month, Evanston zoning officials gave the go-ahead to the school's design, and the first of three construction bids is set to begin this week, administrators said.

First approved in March 2022, the $48.4 million project was scaled back earlier this year after running significantly overbudget during the design stage.

Three stories became two, and plans to include sixth through eight grades were scrapped. The redesign now includes a large multipurpose room, rather than a traditional auditorium, which will serve various community and educational functions.

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District 65 College and Career Director Kirby Callam, who is managing the project, said a groundbreaking ceremony is planned in mid-July, work on building the structure is due to begin in October with completion scheduled as soon as June 2026.

Callam said the district has already sent out notices to residents who live in the immediate vicinity of the site.

"We want to follow a model where those folks impacted by construction are constantly updated with what's going on throughout this whole two-year process," Callam told the board at an April 8 committee meeting.

A design open house is scheduled for May 7 at the Fleetwood Jourdain Community Center, 1655 Foster St. The district's architects and administrators will be on hand to present the latest design plans and hear recommendations from the community for what to call the new school, Callam said.

"We need to put a logo on our gym floor, and that needs to go in the design," Callam said. "So we need a mascot."

A special board committee on renaming will submit recommendations to the full board ahead of the May 20 meeting, he said this week.

Meanwhile, the District 65 board convened the first of three planned public hearings Monday over its plans to shutter the Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies after the new 5th Ward school opens after 2025-26 school year.

Dozens of supporters of the school rallied ahead of the hearing, marching from the school at 3701 Davis St., Skokie, to the Joseph E. Hill Early Childhood Center, 1500 McDaniel Ave., Evanston.

Bessie Rhodes has been a fully bilingual school — known in educator jargon as two-way immersion, or TWI — since 2017.

Rebeca Mendoza, a 5th Ward resident and the director of Evanston Latinos, was on the school board at the time and among those who addressed the impending closure of Bessie Rhodes at Monday's hearing.

Mendoza said she had been proud of the vote at the time, recalling it was the first time that the local Latino community felt seen. She questioned why Bessie Rhodes was chosen when other schools in the district have higher costs.

"If this decision is made, this is going to go down as another historic harm that District 65 has implemented on people of color," Mendoza said.

The former board member said it would be painful to look back at this point in Evanston's history, and expressed concern about the lack of leadership for bilingual education and the debt that the district is passing onto children.

"Here we are, again, hurting an entire community," she said. "For as long as I've been here — I was educated by District 65 — we've been treated as second-class citizens, and we stay quiet because we are grateful for the education we receive in this school district."