The Evanston Township High School/District 202 Board of Education recognized a retiring board member and swore in the new board for the 2021-2022 school year on Monday in their first in-person meeting since the start of the pandemic.
Jude Laude, a member of the board since 2017, is retiring but plans to continue youth advocacy efforts in Evanston as director of programs at Youth Job Center.
Laude thanked the Evanston community and his colleagues and reflected on his time on the board.
“I grew up here as a first generation Haitian,” Laude said. “(My father) would sit at the kitchen table and say, ‘I’m not leaving you any money, but I’m gonna leave you my name,’ and one of the greatest honors for me in my life was when I ran for the board and I saw his name all over this town.”
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In the spring of her junior year, ETHS student Carmiya Bady was supposed to play Velma Kelly in “Chicago” but the pandemic closed schools before the show could begin. Countless performances, both at ETHS and Evanston’s several community theatres, were subsequently postponed, canceled, or went virtual.
As summer came, with no end to COVID in sight, Tim Rhoze, Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre’s artistic director, approached Andrew Biliter, the artistic director of Mudlark Theater, with an idea.
Rhoze proposed a partnership between Fleetwood-Jourdain, Mudlark and Piven Theatre Workshop that would provide Evanston high school students the space and funding to devise their own show, with Biliter acting as the devising facilitator.
Evanston Township High School students are continuing to educate the Evanston community and press on racial equity in the city, even as they say the momentum behind last summer’s wave of antiracism action has fizzled.
Since the police killing of George Floyd last spring, ETHS senior Mika Parisien has been working as a board member of both Students Organized Against Racism and Evanston Fight for Black Lives.
Through these organizations, Parisien is leading equity workshops to discuss antiracism, at her school and at other Evanston schools. EFBL has also met with City Council, organized protests and redistributed donations through a mutual aid fund.