"More Losers Than Winners"

"More Losers Than Winners" Facing up to closing down some schools

This year the number of children attending school in the U.S. has dropped to 47.8 million, down 3.3 million from a decade ago. All over America in towns and cities and suburbs, agonizing choices about closing schools and dismissing teachers are now being made. TIME Midwest Correspondent Barry Hillenbrand took a firsthand look at one troubled elementary school district in Evanston, Ill., on Chicago's North Shore, where four school buildings are to be closed. His report:

Evanston was at first surprised by declining enrollment. Experts had been predicting a steady growth in the town for years. Besides, Joseph E. Hill, superintendent for District 65, points out: "It was something we did not like, so we were reluctant to meet it head on." But last fall, after making a rough forecast of pupil population by counting birth records at local hospitals, the district faced up to a grim conclusion: the present total of 8,000 students, already down 3,000 from the 1968 record of 11,000, would drop to 6,000 in five years. At the same time, townspeople voted down a $2 million increase in the property tax. Says Gail Curry, president of the Willard School P.T.A.: "The people were saying they didn't want to pay government any more taxes, and the school tax was the only one they had any direct vote on."

After the vote, Superintendent Hill took a deep breath and wrote a five-year plan for the district calling for the closing of four school buildings (out of 18) and the trimming of $2.4 million in staff and program costs. Hill was prepared for a bitter debate on his 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.

It was bitter and theatrical. One night some parents carried in a child's coffin: while placard-bearing children blew out 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 dragged on.

The din 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.

In Willard's place the board decided to ax the Kingsley School. The reason was that Kingsley, one of the newest and finest buildings in the system, seemed ideal for profitable leasing to the city as a gym and 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 community activity. The N.A.A.C.P. is preparing a suit to keep Foster open.

Another unpleasant surprise to parents was the fact that it is so hard to make money out of school property. The closing of school buildings, nearly all in prime residential neighborhoods, will not result in a bonanza for the district, as many taxpayer organizations claimed. Local zoning and state laws greatly restrict the district's ability to rent any building to profit-making companies. Tearing the buildings down and selling the valuable land is equally complicated. It is also a source of concern to parents who believe--with some reason--enrollments may one day increase and the buildings will be needed for students again and could not be duplicated or brought back at anything like present prices. Because most of the teaching staffs will simply be transferred elsewhere in the district, Evanston will save only about $150,000 in upkeep and payroll for each school closed.

Inevitably, school closings are more painful to parents than to students. "Kids don't care that much," says one parent,"as long as they can be a crossing guard at the new school. Kids, you know, don't know a thing about property values."

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