Group Makes Offer To Buy Foster School Building From Family Focus

EVANSTON, IL — The Family Focus board is considering an offer to purchase the former Foster School building, a local landmark with a significant role in the history of Evanston's black community. A group of roughly 30 Evanstonians has made a $700,000 offer to buy the building, Pioneer Press reported. The structure was listed for sale last June for $2.4 million and granted landmark status in October, over objections from the social services nonprofit Family Focus.

The 2.2-acre site includes a total building size of more than 64,000 square feet with more than 44,000 square feet of rentable space, according to a brochure advertising its sale. The building "could be updated with a reasonable investment," it said, noting that the chance to find a parcel of land of its size "within a mature, stable neighborhood is rare."

Family Focus President CEO Merri Ex declined to comment on the reported purchase offer. In 2017, she said Family Focus was "no longer in a position to support the costs of maintaining the 100-year old Weissbourd-Holmes building." The organization's board voted unanimously to try to sell the building to "offset the deficit connected with building ownership so we can direct our financial resources towards programming," she said in a message to supporters.

The group of residents looking to purchase the property, Foster Center Our Place, plans a large fundraising push and hopes to maintain the building and continue leasing it to nonprofits currently occupying it, according to the Evanston Review. A representative told Pioneer Press the building needs between $10 and $12 million in repairs due to a "significant" level of deferred maintenance. But if the building is allowed to be destroyed, he said, Evanston would become “another Highland Park or Lake Forest.”

Morris "Dino" Robinson, Jr. of Shorefront, an organization devoted to the preservation of black history on the North Shore, filed the application for designation as a local landmark last year. He said the former Foster School is associated with important cultural or social aspects of local history, exemplifies a pattern of neighborhood development significant in Evanston's cultural history and is identified with many historically significant Evanstonians. All are criteria for selection as a local historical landmark:

The structure at 2010 Dewey Avenue embodies a sense of community that has stood for over a century in Evanston’s community. More specifically, the structure serviced a particular segment of Evanston’s community as a school, a symbol of social change and currently, a place for social service.

As the former Foster School, it has educated generations of residents who have made significant local, national and global contributions to society. It later evolved to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Experimental School, serving as a model for innovative teaching, while at the same time addressing significant social changes during the 1960s. As Family Focus, a social service center, the structure pioneered programming that has had a lasting effect in the community it serves. In addition, the building has seeded new upstart organizations.

The original 1905 structure was designed by Ernest Woodyatt, an Evanston resident, that stood until a fire gutted the structure in 1958. A 1926 addition by architects Childs & Smith added more classrooms, a theater and gymnasium. The 1961 addition replaced the original 1905 structure after it suffered a catastrophic fire.
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According to Robinson's historical research, when the Foster School opened in 1905, its student body and faculty were 100 percent white. By 1928, 85 percent of students were black and by 1945 the student body was 100 percent black — a result of discriminatory housing practices ("redlining") and Evanston's participating in Jim Crow segregation.

"Evanston’s plan to segregate the Black community resulted in, and conveniently made, a segregated school. By the end of 1930, most Black residents resided in the Fifth Ward of Evanston and Foster school was centrally located in that ward," Robinsin said. "To ensure that Black students and not White student attended Foster School, boundary lines which determined the school zone for Foster, were drawn down the middle of major streets and through alleys."

White students who lived within Foster School's attendance boundaries were "encouraged" to go to other district schools, according to Robinson, while black students were made to score above a certain percentage on a standardized test to attend majority white schools. Following community protests, black faculty members were eventually hired.

As part of desegregation efforts in the mid-1960s, Foster School was transformed from a neighborhood school to an experimental lab school, with white students selected by lottery bussed in from more crowded areas, Robinson said. It was renamed Dr. Martin Luther King Laboratory School in 1969 and relocated from the site in 1979.

Family Focus leased the property in 1983 and Evanston residents Bernice and Bernard Weissbourd bought the building and donated it to the nonprofit two years later. It's now known as the Weissbourd-Holmes, after the benefactors and its longtime director, former 5th Ward Ald. Delores Holmes.

Read more about the history of Foster School and efforts to save it from Pioneer Press, Evanston RoundTable, and The Daily Northwestern