EVANSTON, IL — Angel Turner fought back tears as she received an enthusiastic welcome at a special board meeting Monday following her appointment as the interim superintendent of Evanston/Skokie School District 65.
Turner, the district’s assistant superintendent of schools, will take over as chief the 16-school district on July 1, when its current the current superintendent, Devon Horton, starts a new job as head of the Georgia’s third-largest school district. Two days after her appointment, district officials notified board members that Turner’s administration will inherit an estimated $4 million budget deficit.
“Your belief and faith in me to pick up the torch and continue to lead this district toward excellence gives me great joy and gratification. I am grateful for the trust and confidence that the board has placed in me, and I assure you all that I will do everything in my power to serve this district to the best of my ability,” Turner told board members. “I recognize the challenges in front of us and also the incredible protentional that lies ahead.”
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Turner thanked Horton for the opportunity to learn under his leadership. After spending three years as a principal for Chicago Public Schools, seven years with the nonprofit Academy for Urban School Leadership and more than two years with the Accelerate Institute, Turner joined District 65 as director of literacy in the summer of 2021. She was promoted the next year to one of the district’s five assistant superintendents.
“I believe that education is the cornerstone of a successful society, and I am passionate about ensuring that every, and I do mean every, student in this district of every background — race, gender, ability level or socioeconomic status — has the ability to reach their full potential,” Turner said.
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“I am committed to working alongside our community to ensure that our students in this district receive a high-quality education that prepares them for success in college, career and life,” she continued. “I believe in building connections and seeing everyone’s humanity. I also recognized the importance of transparency and collaboration in achieving our goals. I am committee to engaging with our community, working collaboratively to address concerns when they arrive and building upon our successes. By working together, we can achieve great things for our students and community.”
Board President Sergio Hernandez said Turner had done incredible work during her 22-month tenure at the district by “building school leadership capacity, overseeing noticeable improvements in culture and climate across our schools, and strengthening systems in order to drive continuous improvement.”
In a statement he read at the meeting and the district later sent to the community, Hernandez said Turner’s “effort to bring back the J-factor, or the joy factor, in the school experience was a central objective of her leadership,” and “helped create a greater sense of normalcy post-pandemic.”
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Related: Superintendent Devon Horton To Depart District 65 Job For Atlanta Area
During the portion of Monday’s special board meeting reserved for comments from the public, representatives of District 65 labor unions welcomed Turner to her new role.
“As you can see,” Hernandez told Turner, “you’ve got the support of your colleagues here, across the district, and we’re looking forward to you continuing this wonderful work around creating equitable systems and transforming our systems to meet the needs of all students, as you mentioned. And we want to continue that momentum and I think you’re the perfect person to do it, as we embark on our permanent search here.”
Board members agreed to call in a trio of executive search firms to come and deliver presentations next month to lay out how they would approach the job of narrowing the field of candidates for a permanent superintendent hire.
Community engagement and familiarity with the district’s work were identified as important factors to look for in a search firm.
“Yes, they have to speak the equity language, right?” said board member Biz Lindsay-Ryan. “If we are constantly explaining what we mean by things, then that’s not going to be good.”
Patch filed a public records request for a copy of the amendment to Turner’s contract that the board approved at Monday’s special meeting, as it had not yet been made public.
Turner will have to hit the ground running. About six weeks after her first day in her new job, her administration will be tasked with presenting a draft budget.
At a finance committee meeting Wednesday, District 65 Business Manager Kathy Zalewski told board members that spending ran over budget by about $4.5 million, leading to a projected operating deficit of $4 million instead of the $600,000 surplus that had been forecast when the budget was approved.
Zalewski said the total cost overrun for purchased services was $5.3 million. The bulk of that was a result of a $4 million increase in the cost of transportation services — “the elephant in the room,” as she described it.
“I know it’s an incredibly large amount, but unfortunately this is the service that’s been requested,” Zalewski said.
Administrators said a school bus driver shortage led to the increased use of single-occupancy cabs to ferry students around at much greater cost than traditional yellow school buses.
There were also $800,000 cost overruns for software purchased and $800,000 for additional staff, she told members of the committee, noting that the money to cover the shortfall would be drawn from cash reserves.
Committee chair Joey Hailpern said the last projections presented to the board in February indicated the district was still on track for a half-a-million-dollar surplus.
“And now we’re $4 million in the hole. That’s a big swing,” Hailpern said.
“I hear you say that it’s transportation and it’s other things. For me, I wonder where we knew this before today, because it hasn’t been a part of these public discussions at these meetings before today,” he said. “And if this was a part of kind of a growing thing, I like to see breadcrumbs along the way so that we know that the tide is turning so that we can build for that.”
Raphael Obafemi, the district’s chief financial and operations officer, told the committee that transportation costs were on the rise but administrators did not anticipate it rising to the degree that it did.
“We were focused on providing services to our kids who needed it, and we were doing everything we possibly could to mitigate the cost,” Obafemi said. “But we had to balance it with making sure that our kids that we promised to transport, that we transport them.”
Obafemi said district staff have contacted Compass Transportation about providing more busses for next year, an adjustment that they could not have made in the middle of the year. He described the challenge as unprecedented.
We’ve never seen anything like this, so it just kind of built and kind of snuck up on us to be honest with you,” he said. “If we had known it was going to be this dicey we would have said something to you about it. We did not anticipate it. It’s never been this bad.”
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