Evanston resident Terri Shepard spots Black children waiting for a bus in her neighborhood early every morning — rain, snow or sunshine — in Evanston’s Fifth Ward. At 3 p.m. every weekday afternoon, she sees buses full of Black children rolling down the street to bring them home.
Since Foster School closed its doors in 1979 as part of the district’s desegregation efforts, there has been no neighborhood elementary school in the primarily Black Fifth Ward. Every day for the nearly 50 years since, every single child has been bused to a different area to attend school — including Shepard’s children.
“What Evanston has done to Black kids — and continues to do — is just atrocious,” Shepard said.
Now, Foster School is being rebuilt, restoring a neighborhood school to the Fifth Ward. It is slated to open its doors in time for the 2026-27 school year. Some community members worry about the $65 million cost of the project, the composition of the student body and what the curriculum will entail — factors that, to them, could determine if the district makes amends to the Fifth Ward.
The neighborhood school
Foster School had almost all Black students in the decades leading up to the 1960s because of discriminatory housing policies that restricted Black residents primarily to the Fifth Ward. All the children in the neighborhood attended the same school, which became a central part of the community.
“I felt comfortable, I felt secure, I felt like I was with family all the time,” said Alice Aikens, a 73-year-old lifelong Evanston resident and former Foster student. “As a kid, I didn’t know there was a difference between Black and white because at school, I didn’t feel discriminated against. I didn’t know there was discrimination.”
Beginning in the 1940s, Foster School hired primarily Black teachers. According to Laurice Bell, the director of the Shorefront Legacy Center, this strengthened the educational value of the school even though it received fewer resources than predominantly white schools.
“Sometimes all of the best stuff doesn’t come from all of the additional things,” Bell said. “It comes from a human being able to look at you and believe in your ability to learn and your ability to achieve just as other students achieve.”
In 1967, amid national school desegregation efforts, the district converted Foster School into a magnet school called the Martin Luther King Jr. Experimental Laboratory School. White students from other parts of Evanston were bused into the new school, while many Black students from the Fifth Ward were reassigned to other elementary schools and bused out.
“Even though there was a school there, it wasn’t a community school any longer,” Bell said. “There wasn’t that sense of ‘This is ours, this is our neighborhood, this is what we built up.’”
A little more than a decade later, in 1979, the school closed altogether. The neighborhood children moved to schools in other areas with primarily white students in other parts of town. Councilmember Krissie Harris, who grew up in the Fifth Ward and now represents the Second Ward, was one of the students who was reassigned from the King Lab School.
“I remember saying, ‘I’m not going to a new school. I hate it already,’ and having a temper tantrum,” Harris said.
Once the Fifth Ward no longer had a local school, many Black students could not go home for lunch, participate in school athletics or ask for homework help from other neighborhood kids, who now attended an array of other schools, Bell said.
“You lose community, and it might not show that loss immediately,” Bell said. “It might take another generation before you realize what you’ve missed and what isn’t there.”
For Aikens, switching to a mainly white school was a difficult transition.
“It seemed like they had more things than I had, and that was when I felt inferior,” Aikens said. “Whereas before, I didn’t feel less than — I always felt like I was equal, before.”
“Going to the Foster School for me was a wonderful experience,” she added. “It’s just sad to me that my daughter and my grandson weren’t able to see it and have that experience.”
Rebuilding and repairing
Jerome Summers, a former school board member who attended Foster School as a child in the 1950s, raised the idea of rebuilding Foster School in 2005. His goal will finally be met in 2026, if all goes well, when the new school opens with the capacity for around 600 students.
“Everybody deserves close and proximate education to them,” Harris said. “A place that they call home, a place they create their identity, where they learn not only from the institution itself but from the participants.”
In 2021, Evanston became the first city in the United States to approve a taxpayer-funded reparations program. It has since dispersed about $5.5 million to Black residents hurt by housing discrimination. While Foster School is also intended to remedy a past wrong, Bell sees the project as distinct from reparations.
“Reparations are for a harm that was done to people and are for who it was done to,” Bell said. Rebuilding the Foster School, though, will help future students rather than those who were affected by its closure.
Some community members are skeptical that the new school can repair the damage that was done decades ago. This is a primary concern that Harris hears from the Fifth Ward.
“While it tries to address the harm done in the past, those people are gone,” she said. “Those students are adults. They’ve left the community, whether they can’t afford to be here, are disenfranchised or just moved on.”
Aikens feels sure that the comfort she felt at Foster School as a child will not be replicated by the new school.
“I don’t even think it ever existed anymore once the other Foster School closed,” she said.
The cost of building the school adds to residents’ concerns. According to the District 65 website, the estimated cost of the construction is $65 million, up from the original goal of $40 million. The project was also scaled back from a K-8 school to a K-5 school to reduce the cost.
The district has been struggling with a financial crisis in recent years, according to the Evanston Roundtable. To Aikens, the cost of the school is not worth it.
“Because there’s a lack of funding, or because of the way the money was mishandled, the children that are coming through now are not going to be able to get the type of education that I was able to get going through the school system,” Aikens said. “To me, [Foster School] is just a waste of money.”
Harris acknowledged that she hears concerns about the financial strain from Evanston residents — but to her, the benefits of rebuilding the school outweigh the cost.
“I hate what it comes with, but with the right educators, the negative will fall away once you see the product of what they’re doing,” Harris said.
Residents have also voiced concerns that students will be bused in from outside the Fifth Ward at the expense of local children. According to the District 65 website, the school will be open to all Fifth Ward children, and students from other areas would have to go through a transfer process.
The population in the Fifth Ward has become less predominantly Black over the years, Bell said. She added that while she was excited about the rebuilding of Foster School, her joy was tempered because the community has changed so much.
“For many, it feels as though the timing wasn’t a mistake — that the approval of the school worked after so many years of it not working because there was more diversity that could happen,” Bell said. “And within a certain amount of years, will it still be a Black community, or will it be a history piece?”
Some community members are urging District 65 to implement an African-Centered Curriculum (ACC) option at Foster School. The program, which the district implemented at Oakton Elementary School in 2006, is a voluntary track that supplements the district’s curriculum by including a focus on African history.
Shepard was one of the founders of the ACC program at Oakton and has been pushing the district to offer it at Foster School as well. At a May school board meeting, Shepard, her daughter and her granddaughter all spoke in favor of the program.
Shepard and her husband began advocating for ACC in Evanston because Black students, on average, were academically performing at significantly lower levels than their white counterparts.
“We both decided the main difference was that Black kids couldn’t see themselves in anything curricular,” Shepard said. “They knew about themselves being enslaved, but they had no idea who they were before then and had no examples of what they could be in the present day.”
Shepard referenced the Amplifying Black Voices in Educational Equity survey, which interviewed 400 Black Evanstonians and found that the majority supported having a STEM curriculum and an African-Centered Curriculum at the new school.
“Those are the people who are going to be going to school, so why wouldn’t you give them something they’re asking for?” Shepard said. “If this is repair, then let’s repair. Let’s not compound the issue, let’s correct it.”
With just over a year until the Fifth Ward has a local school for the first time in nearly 50 years, residents stressed the importance of doing right by the neighborhood that bore the consequences of desegregation and lost a centerpiece of its community.
“This is the beginning of what education redress should be and look like — if it goes to that community that is owed it,” Harris said. “The community that you took from, you have to give back to.”
