‘Launching a Legacy:’ Bessie Rhodes community bids farewell on final day for Skokie school

(Editor’s Note: Hope Perry reported this story for Evanston RoundTable, a neighboring independent newsroom. It was shared with The Record as part of an ongoing collaborative effort.)

Following a last day of school on June 5 filled with graduation ceremonies and celebrations, the Dr. Bessie Rhodes School of Global Studies in Skokie has closed for good.

The Evanston/Skokie School District 65 School Board voted in June 2024 to close Bessie Rhodes, the district’s only entirely bilingual school and its most racially and socioeconomically diverse.

The school instituted wall-to-wall two-way immersion in Spanish and English in 2017.

PTA Co-President Melissa Rosenzweig told the RoundTable on Thursday, June 4, that the Bessie Rhodes community has been meaningful for her family.

“It has meant some really wonderful and long-lasting friendships and opportunities to be immersed in a multicultural, multilingual setting,” she said. “For my wife and I, it’s meant creating relationships with parents that have been really important to us. They were forged on the protest lines, but they have turned into really wonderful sources of joy since then.”

Peter Schenk, a father of two students at Bessie Rhodes, also said the school community has bonded through the “trauma” of the school-closure process.

Principal Charlise Berkel told the RoundTable that her team has spent time this year teaching students about the school’s namesake, Dr. Bessie Rhodes, a Black educator who dedicated decades to education in Skokie and Evanston.

“And this year, I started with a theme for myself of leaving and launching a legacy,” Berkel said. “And to help the children really understand that the legacy of the Global Studies school. The building may be closing, but the legacy lives on in us.”

Berkel will serve as principal of the new Foster Elementary School next year, where many current Bessie Rhodes students are expected to enroll.

Many families in the diverse, bilingual Bessie Rhodes community have been on edge this year because of the presence of federal immigration agents. Berkel said that members of the local community in Skokie as well as Bessie Rhodes families and teachers worked together to ensure the safety of students.

“I think the one thing that is important is that we approach all of our challenges at the school with a team approach,” Berkel said.

For Schenk, who grew up speaking Spanish with his Guatemalan mother, the bilingual focus of the school was important for preserving his family’s heritage.

“A lot of Latin American families that moved here, they end up losing their culture, they end up losing their connection to older folks,” Schenk said, adding that his children and their classmates sound like native speakers and cited a teacher who said it was gratifying to see students from so backgrounds speaking Spanish together.

Schenk’s two children will attend Foster next year and continue in the TWI program, he said.

Schenk said that in a farewell message Friday Berkel described knowing English and Spanish as “doubling everything.”

“Your world is literally twice as large when you speak another language, and so it’s been huge to have that language opportunity,” Schenk said. “ … We’ve paid a dear price for it, I feel, in some ways, because it’s like the community’s taken a beating.”

Berkel said she planned to use imagery involving the school mascot, the Rockets, in her farewell message to students.

“I think we will finish off with me explaining from Grades K to 7 in simple terms and bilingual terms, so that all the children understand what is the basic legacy that I expect to carry in their hearts, regardless of where they go,” she said. “So tomorrow will be the day that we launch all our rockets at once.”

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