Evanston Now
Members of Evanston’s two school board have decided to keep their existing leaders for another year.
Anya Tanyavutti and Biz Lindsey-Ryan.
Members of Evanston’s two school board decided to keep their existing leaders for another year Monday night.
The Evanston/Skokie District 65 board re-elected Anya Tanyavutti as president and Biz Lindsay-Ryan as vice president. No other board members were nominated for the positions.
The Evanston Township High School board voted to retain Pat Savage-Williams as president and Monique Parsons as vice president.
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The District 65 School Board held its first in-person meeting in more than a year at the Joseph E. Hill Administration Building tonight, May 3, wearing masks and spread out about six feet from each other.
The meeting, called the Board’s reorganization meeting, consisted of swearing in four Board members, electing officers, and honoring several members of the Board, one whose term expired and another who resigned.
Swearing in Four Members
Board member Sergio Hernandez, acting as President Pro Tem, swore in the four people who won seats on the Board in the April 6 election. Three of the winners are incumbents: Soo La Kim, Joseph “Joey” Hailpern, and Elisabeth “Biz” Lindsay-Ryan. The fourth winner is Donna Wang Su. They will each serve a four-year term on the Board beginning today, May 3, 2021.
School candidate has two-week wait to see if she won
Donna Wang Su trailed in early returns but pulled ahead as ballots from Skokie precincts were counted.
Donna Wang Su.
Donna Wang Su says “she stayed up pretty late last night, refreshing the page” that had election returns.
Those returns came in much slower than expected, but when the counting was finished, Su took the fourth and final seat on the Evanston/Skokie District 65 school board, base on numbers released by the County Clerk’s office this afternoon, by just 46 votes over Marquise Weatherspoon, 5,438 to 5,392.
But because mail-in ballots postmarked by election day will still be counted if they arrive in the next two weeks, Su says she’s still “a little on the nervous side. I don’t feel comfortable” declaring victory quite yet. There’s still a chance that Weatherspoon could win. In fact, on her Facebook page, Weatherspoon posted that she “has not given up hope.”
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Early voting for the April 6 General Election begins March 22. As with the Feb. 23 primary election, voters can cast their ballots in person in Room G300 of the Morton Civic Center, 2100 Ridge Ave., through April 5.
Eight of the City’s nine wards have contested elections, with incumbents in six of them seeking re-election. Two candidates are vying for the position of City Clerk. In the School Board races, eight candidates have filed for the four open positions on the District 65 Board, while at District 202, only three – all incumbents – have filed for the four open positions.
Evanston Now
Push for STEM school in predominantly Black 5th Ward runs up against looming district budget deficits.
An image from the candidate forum.
School board candidates in Evanston/Skokie District 65 had a hard and sometimes painful discussion Wednesday night about something many parents want but the district likely can’t afford right now a new school in the 5th Ward.
It’s an issue which combines two challenging topics money and race.
All eight candidates, three incumbents and five challengers, answered questions in a Facebook forum hosted by Evanston Live TV.
The primarily minority 5th Ward has been without a school for decades, with children being bused to other parts of town. Non-incumbent Marquise Weatherspoon, a parent of four, said Black children often “do not feel included” in other schools. She said a 5th Ward school is needed.