“Foster Elementary School is back,” declared Nichole Pinkard, president of the Evanston-Skokie School District 65 Board of Education, at an opening celebration Friday, Aug. 7.
The launch of the new Foster School represents a historic day for D65 and Evanston, observers have said, because it replaces the original Foster Elementary, which was closed in 1979 in an effort to desegregate the school district, leaving Evanston’s historically African American Fifth Ward without a neighborhood school.
As a result of that decision, “generations of children were bused across the city,” Pinkard said, but throughout the years, local school advocates kept demanding that Foster Elementary return.
“This is a joyful day,” she said. “This day exists because they refused to give up.”
The new two-story, 24-classroom school at 1600 Simpson St., Evanston, will open Aug. 24 with room for 600 students and more than 40 teachers and staff members.
The final cost of the almost 80,000-square-foot building is expected to be more than $3 million under the project’s $48.5 million budget.
It’s also the first new elementary school in the district in more than 60 years.
The decades-long advocacy for a new neighborhood school and the decision to close the original Foster School were also mentioned by Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss.
“We are here to celebrate our community making good on what should be the most obvious promise in the whole world — which is that every child deserves an excellent neighborhood school,” said Biss, who is also the Democratic Party’s nominee for Illinois’ 9th District congressional seat.
“The closure of Foster School half a century ago — which might have been well-intentioned — was wrong,” he added. “It was a mistake. You don’t solve the problem of segregation by dismantling institutions in the heart of the Black community. You don’t solve the problem of racial oppression by taking apart what is thriving in the Black community.”
Biss told the Foster advocates that they are on “the right side of history” and an “inspiration to every person in this town who wants to make the community better and more just.”
Fifth Ward Alderman Bobby Burns also praised the long-term Foster School proponents, saying they risked friendships to “unapologetically advocate for the return of a neighborhood school in the Fifth Ward.”
“Foster is family,” Burns said.
He also thanked the District 65 School Board and administration for their courage in going forward with the project and said the school’s architects and construction managers, Cordogan, Clark & Associates, deserve applause for “delivering a beautiful building” on schedule and under budget.
District 65 has been beset by financial troubles and lower enrollment in recent years and has had to close another school, Kingsley, and lay off staff.
Burns told the young people in the audience that they have the privilege of being the founding student class of the new Foster Elementary School and, with that “comes the responsibility to define what it means to be a Foster Phoenix: The example you set, the traditions your start, and how you treat one another will become the standard for students who come after you.”
Charlise Berkel, the school’s first principal, echoed those sentiments and said “this school is an act of collective love and shared responsibility.”
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Also at the event was Kimberly Frazier, who attended the old Foster Elementary back in the ’70s.
“I’m excited and I’m going to try to volunteer when I can,” Frazier said. “I think it’s a great asset to the community.”
Frazier noted that she is a seventh-generation Evanston resident and that her uncle worked as an assistant prinicipal in the school district.
“There’s a lot of history here today,” Frazier said as she pointed out Foster alumni and notable community members such as JoAnn Avery, who has a street named after her in Evanston.
Avery runs the after-school programs for Evanston’s branch of the Family Focus education advocacy group and she said it was the children in her program that came up with using the phoenix as the school’s mascot. She thought it was much more appropriate than some of the kids’ other suggestions — such as the Flying Squirrels.
“The Phoenix rose from the ashes and that’s what this school is doing,” Avery explained. “It’s a long time coming.”
Along with the students, Avery said the Foster alumni are excited about the new school.
This includes Connie Bell, a 90-year resident of Evanston who attended Foster Elementary back in 1948 and still remembers her fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Vera Brownlee, the wife of pioneering Black journalist Lester “Les” Brownlee.
“She was a wonderful teacher,” Bell said.
Bell called the new Foster Elementary “a nice building,” adding that she “watched them put it together.”
“The neighborhood has changed,” Bell said. “Teaching will be different with new ways of doing it, and that’s good.”
District 95 is touting the new school’s innovative features.
A press release states the the school is “purposely designed around collaboration” and that it provides “flexible instructional environments that support project-based learning, small-grouup instruction, and individualized learning experiences.”
Classrooms are designed to maximize storage space, provide “abundant natural daylight,” and optimize flexibility.
“We do have a lot of flexible space,” said Ben Nelson, Cordogan, Clark & Associates’ construction executive for the project.
This flexibility is most on display in the facility’s “cafetorium,” which can hold 200 students at a time for lunch and 250 audience members for school assemblies during the day and community guests at night.
A divisible multi-purpose room provides space for the orchestra, indoor recess, after-school programs, and staff meetings, while the gymnasium can also serve as a reinforced tornado shelter capable of holding about 650 people, according to a district press release.
Credit for getting the school built under budget goes to an “A-Team” design staff and the decision to go out for six different construction bid packages instead of just one, Nelson said.
Sustainable features include a rooftop solar array that will generate about 25% of the school’s energy needs, low-flow plumbing fixtures for greater water efficiency, and advanced energy-monitoring systems and lighting controls.
Windows also have patterns on them that allow birds to recognize them as a solid barrier. The school’s main office features bulletproof glass and the digital clocks in the hallways can post alerts during emergencies.
Classrooms are color-coded for each grade and the playground is divided into age-appropriate spaces. The outdoor basketball court and athletic field are being shared with the community when school is not in session.
“The return of a community school to the Fifth Ward is historic,” said Melissa Messenger, District 65’s executive chief of communications. She added that the new Foster Elementary School showcases “what education can be like.”