Thrive65

The current situation with D65

~20 min read

Thrive65 was formed, in part, because most people in the district don’t have the time to sift through all the documents and attend every board meeting. We want to make sure folks have a plain-language guide to D65 so they can feel informed and empowered to advocate.

Most people come to this having heard fragments. Something at pickup, something in a group chat, something at a board meeting. If you’re not sure what’s going on, that’s a reasonable place to be. This is complicated, and almost nobody has the whole picture.

Below are five things we believe are true, each traceable to a document you can open yourself. After that, what’s coming up on the calendar, and our own take. We’ve kept our opinions in a clearly marked section at the bottom so you can read the facts without having to take our word for anything.

Five things that are true

1. There are meaningfully fewer children here than there used to be.

District enrollment has fallen from 7,943 students in 2018-19 to 5,941 in 2025-26, a decline of about 25%. That is far steeper than what neighboring districts experienced. Across 21 nearby districts, the next largest decline was 14.3%. [1]

Our incoming 1st grade class is 14% smaller than our incoming 5th grade class and 17% smaller than our incoming 8th grade class, further supporting the continuation of lower enrollment trends. [4]

Two explanations circulate, and they point toward different solutions. The district’s own demographer attributes most of the decline to a shrinking population of school-age children in Evanston and Skokie, driven by an aging population and slow turnover in the housing stock. Families choosing private or other options is a significant factor, though a smaller one. The share of local school-age children attending D65 slipped from about 82% to about 79% between 2020 and 2024. [2]

The same study also found this isn’t a bottomless slide. Enrollment declines steeply for about five more years, then nearly flattens, with a slight uptick projected in the mid-2030s. [2] The district’s own internal projections run steeper than its demographer’s, forecasting a decline of 525 students by 2030-31 against the demography report’s 345. [3] Which of the two has been more accurate is harder to answer than it sounds, because they count different populations and only the district publishes its own error rate. What that record shows is a consistent tilt in one direction: the district’s projection for 2025-26 came in about 1.3% above the students who actually enrolled, and its kindergarten estimates have run high in every year of its five-year table. [3] Recent experience suggests the real number tends to land below the forecast, not above it.

One note on reading enrollment numbers, since more than one is in circulation. The figures above use the state’s “total served” count, the broadest of the district’s published numbers, which adds early childhood, Park School, and Rice Children’s Center to the graded K-8 count. The district’s own November 2025 enrollment memo instead reports 5,630, leaving those programs out. The demography study cited above uses a third scope again. Each is legitimate for the question it was built to answer, and none of them should be mixed with another inside a single comparison. [3]

A second caution: next year’s count isn’t settled, and there is reason to think the published estimate runs high. Kindergarten is the hardest grade to project, because there’s no prior-year class already inside the district to carry forward. The district estimates it by averaging the previous three years of actual kindergarten enrollment. By the district’s own accounting, that method has landed above the real number in every year of its five-year table, by between 5.3% and 12.2%, and the memo acknowledges that kindergarten error rates tend to run higher than others. [3] This year registration also opened two months late, on February 1 instead of December 1, after the closure debate pushed it back, and as of May 2026 only 157 registrations were complete against 238 at the same point the year before. [4][20] Neither fact settles what the final number will be, but both point the same way.

2. The district kept a footprint built for the larger enrollment.

In September of last year, our current board president and a former president), wrote a letter to the community which said, in part, “With long term declining enrollment, staffing and maintaining so many buildings increases our administrative costs and detracts from our ability to improve the quality of our instruction. To increase our utilization rate to the recommended 80%-90%, we must consolidate schools.” [5]
For the coming 2026-27 school year, our ten K-5 elementary schools are projected to average about 333 students, with an average capacity of 495. The district is projecting 67% occupancy in our K-5 schools. [6]

We would need to enroll 628 more children this year to reach 80% (referred to in the quote from our board as the lower end of the recommended range). The board’s resolution from January states a goal of 75% enrollment, which would still mean 381 more children need to enroll to reach the lowered occupancy target of 75% for this school year.

3. The buildings are old, the repair bill is large, and it has been growing for twenty years.

The average D65 building is over 80 years old. A 2026 assessment by the architecture firm StudioGC estimated roughly $598 million in needed repairs. That total covers a 49-year horizon, so it isn’t a bill due all at once. But it is heavily front-loaded: by the assessment’s own year-by-year schedule, about $409.6 million of it, roughly 68%, falls in the first ten years. [7] The scale of the problem is long-term. The timing of it is not.

The problem isn’t new, but it is growing. A district life-safety survey flagged $16 million in work back in 2005, that still hadn’t been completed by 2015. By then, the identified need had reached roughly $90 million. [8] In 2022, Cordogan Clark provided the board a facilities plan for 20 years (2021-2040), totalling $263 million. The total keeps climbing in part because the work has never been adequately funded. Last year, the board committed $2.7 million a year toward the backlog, then reduced that to $2.4 million to help close the FY27 budget gap. [11]

Part of that bill is not optional. In August 2026 the administration brought the board the 10-Year Health/Life Safety Survey that Illinois requires of every district once a decade. It identifies $128.8 million in health and life safety work, sorted by whether it must be corrected within one year, five years, or ten. [27] That figure is a portion of the facilities totals above rather than an addition to them, roughly 31% of the identified ten-year need. The difference is that most of the backlog is a question of priorities, while this part carries legal deadlines. The memo gives one combined figure and does not break out how much falls due within a year, so that piece is not yet public. [27] Some of that 128.8 million could be funded through increased levies that do not require a referendum. See the FAQ on this for more detail.

For most families, this is where the problem becomes visible. Maintenance money spread across too many aging buildings means none of them gets properly fixed. The work that does get done is the emergency repair rather than the one that would have prevented the emergency, and every building gets a little worse each year while the bill for fixing it grows. A capital referendum may be necessary to make meaningful progress on updating our buildings. And the deferred maintenance that leads to serious issues can result in higher taxes with no vote for D65 residents, because Illinois law lets a board levy and issue bonds for state-approved life safety work without a referendum. [28]

Note: With the closure of Bessie Rhodes and Kingsley, the district will be able to save about $37 million dollars of that $409.6 million due over the next 10 years, assuming they do not keep the buildings. [7]

4. The shortfall is structural, which means it comes back on its own.

Illinois law caps how fast a district’s property tax revenue can grow, limiting it to the lesser of 5% or inflation. In practice that has meant roughly 2 to 2.5% a year. D65’s underlying costs grow closer to 3.9% a year, driven mostly by negotiated salary and benefit increases and utilities. [9]

A gap like that doesn’t close through economizing. It reopens every year until either costs or revenue change.

The district’s own five-year model, presented to the board in April 2026, showed what was at stake. On a do-nothing basis it projected a slide from 107 days of cash on hand in FY25 to negative 14 days by FY30, meaning the district would have run out of money. With the planned reductions applied, the same model projected holding 90 days through FY30. [9]

That do-nothing scenario is no longer the baseline, but the plan is not finished either. The board closed most of the FY27 gap, and roughly $300,000 of that came from cutting the building maintenance transfer rather than from operating reductions. [9][10] That money has to be found twice: once as operating cuts that still haven’t been made, and again as facilities work that won’t get done. The district’s own CFO also warned that FY27 will look stronger than it is, because delayed Cook County property tax receipts expected in FY26 will land in FY27 instead. That’s a matter of timing, not a change in the rate of increase in revenue. [9]

Hitting 90 days of cash also isn’t the same as being comfortable. Ninety days is the floor the board set for itself, not a healthy cushion. By the state’s own standard it is a thin one: fewer than 5% of Illinois districts hold less than 100 days of cash, and ISBE requires 180 days to earn full marks on that measure. [29] Money goes out on a steady schedule and comes in on an unpredictable one, and that ordinary mismatch can burn through the reserve quickly. In November 2025, when Cook County’s payment ran late, the district had to borrow $15 million to make payroll, and after setting aside funds to repay that loan it was down to roughly two months of operating expenses. [12]

What’s left is roughly $10 million in further reductions across FY28 through FY30, and the FY27 round is a fair preview of what that costs. Closing $6.3 million meant cutting crossing guards, removing hazard designations that had required busing on two routes, eliminating a STEM program, and reversing planned counselor and librarian cuts only by taking the money from somewhere else. [10] The next $10 million will be harder than that was. The new CFO’s year-end report points the same direction, stating that district expenses must be contained and that appropriate measures must be taken in the fall to realign resources. [26]

5. No single change closes the gap. It takes several at once.

Reducing administrative overhead produces genuine savings. Independent community analysis puts the remaining opportunity at roughly $2.8 million to $5.5 million a year, depending on how deep a reduction you’re willing to make. [14] The district itself identified an $8.3 million pool, but that number should be treated carefully. Reaching it would mean eliminating 64 positions, roughly 40% of the district’s entire administrative payroll. It more plausibly describes everything eligible for review than anything recommended to cut in a year. [22]

Closing an elementary school produces genuine savings too. The district estimated about $2.0 million a year for Kingsley and $2.1 million for Lincolnwood. [13] Independent community analyses put a single closure closer to $1.69 -1.8 million. [14] Selling a closed building saves more still, because it also sheds that building’s share of the repair backlog. For context, Bessie Rhodes and Kingsley together carry roughly $37 million of the district’s near-term capital needs through 2036. [7]

That last part warrants caution. Selling is permanent. Evanston is landlocked and considerably built out, so sites are scarce as well as expensive, school construction costs far more than upkeep (if maintenance is not deferred regularly), and a district that has sold its spare capacity has no realistic way to get it back if enrollment steadies or a program needs a new home. Closing a building and selling it are two separate decisions, and the second one should be argued on its own terms. [21]

Set those against a Phase III target of $16 to $18 million in cumulative reductions by FY30, with roughly $10 million of that still to be identified. [9][10]

What about special education costs?

Special education spending rose sharply, from $27.8 million to $45.1 million in state and local funds between 2021-22 and 2023-24, while the number of students with IEPs actually fell slightly. [15] In FY2026 the district finished about $3.0 million over budget on special education, split roughly evenly between staffing and tuition for students placed outside the district, the largest single expenditure variance in the year. [26]

The audit the district commissioned to explain that increase says close to the opposite of what most people assume. It found D65’s programs comply with federal law, that placement processes follow best practice, and that the district’s inclusion rate is higher than the state average and higher than every comparison district. Nothing in it suggests any student receives services they don’t need, and nothing in it gives the district license to reduce any child’s services. Those are set by that child’s IEP team under federal law, not by a budget. [15]

What the auditors could not do was explain where the money went. Transportation quadrupled and they ruled out the obvious causes. Purchased services grew fivefold and the district could not produce records of what was bought. Over the same period the achievement gap for students with disabilities widened rather than narrowed. [15]

That’s an accountability problem about systems, not a cost problem about children. It is also the clearest case on this page for why financial discipline and student outcomes are the same fight rather than competing ones.

What this costs people

Closing a school is a real loss, and it lands differently on different families. Children lose teachers they trust and the walk home with friends. Some will be assigned to a different school than the children down the street. Staff lose jobs and the school communities they helped build. A neighborhood loses an institution that anchored it, which appears on no budget line anywhere. For some families the hardest part will be a longer trip and less room in the day to absorb it. For others it will be watching a place their family has been tied to for a generation close for good.

The other lever has a human impact too.The district has already eliminated roughly 130 positions across the first two phases of this plan, and cut another 52.5 in the FY27 round the board approved in May 2026. [22][23]

Many of those positions are directly student-facing staff. “Cutting administration” sounds like it means executives, and some of it does. It also means people who process payroll, staff front offices, and keep buildings running, who earn considerably less and have far less cushion when a job ends. Many of these people live nearby. Some of them are neighbors.

Both levers land hard on our school community. Waiting doesn’t spare anyone the cost, it raises it. In late 2025, when Cook County delivered property tax dollars late, the district had to take out a $15 million short-term loan just to make payroll. That one loan cost more than $1.1 million in fees, interest, and lost investment income, money that never reached a classroom. [12] The longer the underlying gap goes unaddressed, the more often the district ends up paying that kind of premium instead of teaching with it.

What happens next

August 2026. A construction financing payment for Foster comes due, with roughly $4.8 million still needed to complete the building. The district has earmarked proceeds from selling the Bessie Rhodes building, but that sale hasn’t closed and the timing may not line up. [16]

October 2026. The resolution checkpoint. In January 2026, when the board voted to close Kingsley, it set three conditions defining financial sustainability in its own terms: a balanced budget, 90 days of cash on hand, and a $2.7 million capital maintenance commitment. October is when it assesses whether it has met them, alongside a utilization test. That assessment is the most consequential decision of the year, because the resolution attaches consequences to falling short, including a commitment to consider further school closings during the 2026-2027 school year. [9]

This Fall: FY27 budget will be finalized and voted on by the board.

Date not yet set: a merged board framework. Two board members each wrote a plan for what comes next. ELEVATE, by Maria Opdycke, proposes roughly a year of community visioning toward a board vote in May 2027 and a referendum after that. Stabilize, Imagine, Plan, Invest, by Andrew Wymer, proposes deciding a closure scenario by October 31, 2026 and adopting policy guardrails on reserves, capital spending, and administrative staffing. At the June 22, 2026 meeting, board president Nichole Pinkard directed the two members to merge their plans and bring a single version back to the board. No date has been announced for that. [17]

The superintendent search, running alongside all of this. Superintendent Angel Turner and the board reached a mutual separation agreement concluding her service on June 30, 2026. Eric Witherspoon, former ETHS superintendent, is serving as interim from July 1 through January 31, 2027. The board issued a request for proposals for a search firm on July 17, with proposals due July 31 and firm selection expected in mid-August. Under the board’s tentative timeline, finalists are identified in mid-December, selection happens in late January, and the permanent superintendent starts July 1, 2027. [18]

Three things follow from that calendar. The October checkpoint falls inside the candidate recruitment window, so the district will make its most consequential financial decision of the year while trying to attract a superintendent, and candidates will be watching what it decides. The interim appointment ends January 31, 2027, while the permanent hire isn’t scheduled to arrive until July 1, 2027, and the district has not yet said publicly who leads in between. And both board frameworks run eighteen months or longer, which means whoever is eventually hired will inherit a plan they had no part in writing. [17][18]

Still pending. The results of the forensic audit. Originally expected reporting in late April 2026 (page 19 of their proposal). There was a very brief update in the June 22, 2026 board packet from board leadership saying only “Board leadership continues to engage with Crowe LLP on the D65 financial audit.The report will be shared when it’s ready”

The audit is to include items such as many standard financial control and risk areas, and to review information related to the 2022 Lease Certificates transaction (including compliance/fraud risk considerations). [24]

Still pending. The results of an internal “HR Audit.” which the board noted during the May 4, 2026 board meeting would be presented at the June Committee of the Whole meeting (it has not been presented as of July 2026). [25]

Where Thrive65 lands

Everything above is documented. This part is our opinion, and you can disagree with all of it while still using the facts above.

Both levers, not one. Right-sizing the building footprint and right-sizing administration add to each other rather than substituting for each other. We support continuing administrative reductions and consolidating buildings, because the arithmetic doesn’t work with either alone. Even with both levers, we will still need more cuts and a referendum.

Set policy, then let someone build the plan. Two board members have each written a framework of their own. Writing plans is not the board’s role. Under the Illinois Association of School Boards’ foundational principles of effective governance, a board sets direction, adopts policy, employs and delegates authority to a superintendent, and then monitors results. Its job here is to adopt measurable policy, meaning a dated FY30 target, a minimum reserve level, a building utilization standard, academic and technology policies, and a decision deadline, and then hold a superintendent accountable for delivering against it. A board that writes the plan has no one left to hold accountable for it. That community groups felt compelled to write their own plans, and that two board members then wrote two more, is a symptom of the leadership gap rather than a solution to it. [17]

Fix the cost base before asking voters for more. A referendum will likely be necessary eventually, since the structural gap reopens in the mid-2030s even if Phase III works exactly as planned. [9] It may well need to be two asks rather than one. Operating money and building money come from different places and generally require separate ballot questions, and the building problem is the larger of the two: roughly $409.6 million in repairs scheduled through 2036 against a commitment of $2.7 million a year, which covers about 6.5% of it. [7] That gap cannot be economized away. It is also a strong argument for a smaller footprint, because reducing the number of buildings is the only lever that shrinks the capital number itself rather than spreading the same money thinner across all of them. Asking this community for money twice, before the cost structure has visibly been repaired, is how you lose both votes.

Stop borrowing from the buildings. Reducing the capital maintenance commitment to close an operating gap, as the district has done to close the FY27 gap, is a one-time move against a permanent problem, and deferred work doesn’t disappear. It comes back more expensive. The StudioGC assessment escalates costs at 4.5% a year, so $300,000 of work skipped now is closer to $466,000 of work a decade from now. Escalation alone accounts for $202.5 million of the $598.2 million total, about a third of the entire bill. [7] The same dynamic shows up in the historical record: $16 million in life-safety work flagged in a 2005 survey was still unfinished a decade later, by which point the district’s total identified facilities need had grown to roughly $90 million. [8] Cutting the transfer also risks the district missing a stability benchmark the board set for itself, right before the October checkpoint that requires it.

Apply shared values evenly. Walkability is consistently near the top of what D65 families say they want, and we take that seriously. We also think it has to mean the same thing in every neighborhood.

The 5th Ward lost its only neighborhood school in 1967 and went without one for 55 years. For much of that time more than 400 Black children were bused out of the ward each year, and the need for a school there was named by the district’s own committees at least as often as 1979, 1992, and 2002, then declined for cost each time. A 2012 referendum would have rebuilt it and failed. The 5th Ward itself voted about 67% in favor. Two neighboring wards voted against it by the widest margins in the entire election, roughly 65% and 64% opposed, even though they had four other elementary schools within their two wards and the 5th Ward had none. Those votes were decisive in defeating the referendum. [19]

We raise this to explain how the word gets used now, not to relitigate a fourteen-year-old vote. A value that applies to one’s own children and not to someone else’s isn’t a shared value. Applied evenly, it means Foster was warranted, and it also means accepting that a fair process may examine if schools that lack the density to support a walkable school that is adequately full.

What we’re not saying

We’re not saying any particular school should close. We’re saying the decision should follow the utilization and facilities condition data, minimizing impact to students who would be disproportionately impacted, applied consistently across the district.

We’re not saying administrators are the problem, or that staff are line items. The people doing this work have absorbed years of uncertainty alongside the rest of the community.

Foster didn’t cause the deficit. How it was financed is a fair question, and it’s separate from whether the 5th Ward deserved a school.

The district’s numbers aren’t beyond question either. Several of them deserve harder scrutiny, and we’ve said so where that’s the case.

Go deeper

The 21 questions people regularly ask → FAQ How to speak at a board meeting → Advocacy Guide

Sources

  1. Evanston RoundTable, “Analysis and viewpoint: District 65 has 25% fewer students, but 10% more staff. Why?” (March 22, 2026), reporting Illinois State Board of Education enrollment data for 2018-19 and district-reported enrollment for 2025-26, and comparing the decline to 21 nearby districts. [link]
  2. District 65, “Updated Demography Study as of December 2024” memo (Feb. 10, 2025), summarizing McKibben Demographics (2024). [link]
  3. District 65, “5-Year Enrollment & Projections” memo to the Board of Education (Committee of the Whole, Nov. 2025), reflecting the Oct. 1, 2025 count. [link]
  4. District 65 board memo on 2026-27 enrollment placements (May 18, 2026), reflecting placements as of May 12, 2026, and reporting kindergarten registration counts and the district’s three-year-average kindergarten projection. [link]
  5. RoundTable, “Letter to the community from the District 65 board” (September 19, 2025). [link]
  6. District 65, “Capacity & Utilization Calculations” worksheet (SY25, board-approved future boundaries with Foster open). [link] District 65, SDRP Hub, “Zero-School Closure (Baseline)” Data Tables, Utilization [link]
  7. StudioGC facility assessment (2026), as presented in District 65, “Combined Master Facility Plan and 10-Year Health Life Safety Report” memo (March 23, 2026) [link]; ten-year figure summed by Thrive65 from Appendix A for 2027 through 2036. Reported in Evanston RoundTable, “District 65 Discusses Report Projecting $598 Million in Facilities Spending Over Next 49 Years” (March 24, 2026) [link].
  8. Evanston RoundTable, “D65 Opens Discussion on Possible Referendum, Will Form a Budget Task Force” (May 20, 2015), reporting the May 2015 board discussion that surfaced $16 million in still-incomplete life-safety work from a 2005 survey, plus roughly $74 million in other identified needs, a combined ~$90 million backlog. [link]
  9. District 65, “2026-2027 (FY27) Preliminary Budget” memo (June 22, 2026). [link]
  10. District 65 Board of Education presentation, “Expenditure Reduction Plan: SDRP Phase 3 Reductions” (April 13, 2026). Any projection beyond FY30 is Thrive65’s own extrapolation from the district’s stated growth assumptions, not a district projection. [link]
  11. Evanston Now, “D65 Breaking a Budget Promise” (April 21, 2026) [link]; Evanston RoundTable, “District 65 to Cut Capital Spending to Meet Budget Target” (April 21, 2026) [link]; Evanston RoundTable, “District 65 School Board Agrees on $969K in Budget Cuts” (May 5, 2026) [link]; and the FY27 preliminary budget memo (June 22, 2026) [link], confirming the $2.4 million capital transfer against the board’s $2.7 million policy commitment.
  12. Evanston Now, “County Tax Mess Cost D65 More Than $1 Million” (Jan. 7, 2026) [link] and “D65: ‘No Positive News’ About Cook County Tax Mess” (Jan. 13, 2026) [link]. The cost comprised roughly $180,000 in issuance and interest plus about $962,000 in forgone investment income on a $15 million tax anticipation warrant.
  13. District 65, “SDRP Phase 3 Scenario Presentation” (Sept. 29, 2025), scenarios 1A and 1B. [link]
  14. Community Proposals: Legion of Data Nerds, “Financial Levers Memo” (Nov. 12, 2025) [link] and administrative growth analysis. [link]; Invest in Neighborhood Schools “Proposal to D65 Board Members”(2025) [link]; and Washington Task Force, “Alternative SDRP III Path - Whatever it Takes” (2025), [link]
  15. WestEd, special education audit commissioned by District 65 (2026), findings on compliance, inclusion rate, spending growth, transportation, purchased services, and achievement gap. [link]
  16. Evanston Now, “D65 Needs More Money to Finish Foster” (May 2026) [link]. District 65 FY27 preliminary budget memo (June 22, 2026) [link].
  17. ELEVATE [link] and Stabilize, Imagine, Plan, Invest (SIPI) [link] frameworks, authored by board members Opdycke and Wymer respectively. Merger directive per Dr. Pinkard at the June 22, 2026 board meetings. Minutes not yet available on Boardbook, but conversation is at roughly 2:40 here: [link]
    Illinois Association of School Boards, “Foundational Principles of Effective Governance” [link]
  18. District 65, “Superintendent Search” (district65.net/about/our-team/superintendent-search), including the board’s tentative search timeline, the July 17, 2026 request for proposals, and the interim appointment terms. Dates on that page are described by the district as tentative and subject to change. [link]
  19. Ward-level results of the March 2012 District 65 referendum per Jordan Graham, “D65 Referendum Precinct Vote Breakdown Shows Split Across Wards,” Evanston Patch (March 22, 2012), from Cook County Clerk precinct data [link]. Foster closure and reopening history per Evanston RoundTable, “School District 65 to Consider New Assignment System…” (Feb. 12, 2021) [link] and “At Last: Ground Broken for New 5th Ward School” (July 16, 2024) [link].
  20. Evanston Roundtable,”District 65 kindergarten registration lags; administrators cite delayed start” [link]
  21. City of Evanston “Housing4All” Mar. 26, 2026) [link]
  22. District 65 “Expenditure Reduction Plan SDRP Phase 3 Reductions” (Apr. 20, 2026) [link]
  23. SDRP staff cuts: Evanston Now, “More cuts at District 65” (April 2024) [link], Evanston Roundtable,”District 65 reveals position cuts; net loss of 91 employees” (May 2025) [link], District 65 “Expenditure Reduction Plan SDRP Phase 3 Reductions” (Apr. 20, 2026) [link]
  24. Crowe LLP forensic audit scope and status, per District 65 board materials: engagement documents [link] and [link]; June 22, 2026 board packet update from board leadership [link].
  25. District 65 Board of Education, minutes of the May 4, 2026 board meeting, noting the HR audit was to be presented at the June Committee of the Whole [link].
  26. District 65, “FY2026 Unaudited Financial Year in Review,” memo (August 3, 2026). [link]
  27. District 65, “HLS Approval for Submission to ISBE,” memo (August 4, 2026), presenting the StudioGC 10-Year Health/Life Safety Survey. [link]
  28. 105 ILCS 5/17-2.11, school board authority to levy taxes or issue bonds for fire prevention, safety, and specified repair purposes, including issuance without referendum where levy proceeds are insufficient. [link]
  29. Illinois State Board of Education, “2025 School District Financial Profile Scores, Based on Fiscal Year 2024 Annual Financial Reports” (October 2025), Table 7. Of 849 districts reporting, 38 (4.5%) held fewer than 100 days cash on hand; ISBE requires a minimum of 180 days to earn the highest score on that indicator. [link]

Thrive65 is an independent community coalition and is not affiliated with or operated by District 65.

This info reflects information available as of mid-2026 and will be updated as new board decisions, reports, and community proposals develop.

Thrive65 assembled our Explainer with help from Claude.ai on summarizing trends and visualizing data sets from multiple sources like news articles, board meeting presentations and comments, D65 SDRP resources, etc. Also a lot of nerding out on history and data from a few of us. Note that we used Claude to help with inline sourcing, if anything is off on sourcing (or anything else!) let us know. This was mostly written and assembled by one person who loves our community and hates free time so there’s bound to be mistakes!