Legion of Data Nerds
Checking District 65’s numbers since 2025. Updated Nov 2, 2026
Enrollment & Buildings · Analysis

Examining Parent Trust: D65 8th Grade vs. ETHS 9th Grade

Every year for a decade, ETHS’s freshman class has outnumbered the prior year’s D65 8th grade, by about 152 students (~20%) on average. That is consistent with, but doesn’t prove, a trust-driven flow from private K-8 to ETHS.

By the Legion of Data Nerds 6 min read

The short version

  1. In every year of the past decade, ETHS’s freshman class has been larger than the D65 8th-grade class that graduated the prior June.
  2. The 10-year average is approximately 152 extra students per year, or ~20% of each D65 8th-grade class.
  3. The gain bottomed at 8.5% during the COVID years and has rebounded since 2022-23: the two most recent years came in at 26%, on a shrinking D65 base.
  4. The data alone cannot distinguish among the possible explanations. The pattern is consistent with but doesn’t prove a trust-driven private-to-public flow.

The question

Evanston has two public school districts that share boundaries: District 65 (K-8) and District 202 / Evanston Township High School (9-12). In a community where parents trust the K-8 district, the natural pattern is for most families to enroll their children in D65 from kindergarten and continue them on to ETHS for high school. Where parents don’t trust the K-8 district, a common pattern emerges: families pay for private K-8 (parochial schools, independent schools, religious schools) and then return to public school for high school, when private tuition becomes considerably more expensive.

Each year, the D65 8th-grade class graduates in June, and the next ETHS freshman class enrolls in August. By comparing these two cohort sizes year over year, we can measure the net flow of students into ETHS at the K-8/9-12 boundary — how many freshmen the public high school gains on top of the D65 graduates.

If parent trust in D65 is declining, we’d expect this gap to grow over time as more families opt out of K-8 D65 but bring their kids back for ETHS. This page presents the data; readers can draw their own conclusions.

What the data shows

Cohort comparison: D65 8th-grade vs. the following year’s ETHS 9th-grade

In every year of the past decade, ETHS’s freshman class has been larger than the D65 8th-grade class that graduated the prior June. There is no year in this 10-year window where the inflow at the K-8 → 9 transition went the other direction.

Net external gain at the transition

How to read this chart The orange bars show the absolute number of “extra” freshmen (ETHS 9th-grade minus the prior year’s D65 8th-grade). The dotted line shows that gain as a percentage of the D65 cohort.

The 10-year average is approximately 152 extra students per year, or ~20% of each D65 8th-grade class.

Composition of each ETHS freshman class

How to read this chart This stacked view shows each ETHS freshman class as the sum of two components: an implied “D65 continuers” portion equal to the prior year’s D65 8th-grade size (blue), plus the external gain (orange).

About 80% of each ETHS freshman class is consistent in size with the D65 graduating cohort the year before.

Has the gap changed over time?

The trend over the past decade is non-monotonic. Key observations from the underlying numbers:

D65 8th cohort → ETHS 9th cohort External gain Gain as % of D65 8th
2015-16 → 2016-17 +198 27.7%
2016-17 → 2017-18 +266 (peak) 35.8% (peak)
2017-18 → 2018-19 +146 17.9%
2018-19 → 2019-20 +124 15.2%
2019-20 → 2020-21 +71 (low) 8.5% (low — COVID)
2020-21 → 2021-22 +100 11.0%
2021-22 → 2022-23 +107 13.6%
2022-23 → 2023-24 +148 19.4%
2023-24 → 2024-25 +189 26.1%
2024-25 → 2025-26 +172 26.3%

A few patterns are visible:

  1. The early window of the decade (2015-16 → 2017-18) saw the largest gains, with 28-36% of the D65 cohort being added at the high school transition. This was also a period when total Evanston enrollment was growing across both districts.
  2. The gain compressed sharply during the COVID years (2019-20 → 2021-22), bottoming at just 8.5%. This is consistent with the well-documented private-to-public migration that many districts experienced as private schools struggled with remote-learning logistics.
  3. The gain has rebounded substantially since 2022-23, with the most recent two years (2023-24 → 2024-25 and 2024-25 → 2025-26) coming in at 26% — close to the early-decade levels but with a critical difference: today’s numbers occur on a shrinking D65 base.

How to interpret this

A larger ETHS 9th-grade class than the prior D65 8th-grade is consistent with several different stories. The data alone cannot distinguish among them. Some possibilities, roughly ordered from “most aligned with the parent-trust hypothesis” to “least”:

  1. Loss of trust in D65: Families enroll children in private/parochial K-8, then bring them back to ETHS for high school. This is the hypothesis the page is built around. The growing 2022→2026 gain on a shrinking D65 base is the most suggestive evidence.
  2. Tuition arithmetic: Even families who are happy with private K-8 may shift to public for grades 9-12 because four years of private high school tuition costs significantly more than four years of private elementary tuition (Chicago-area private K-8 is roughly $20-30K/yr; private high schools $40-60K/yr).
  3. Move-ins for high school: Some families relocate to Evanston specifically for ETHS access (it has a strong reputation regionally) and weren’t in D65 to begin with. This would inflate ETHS 9th-grade independent of D65 trust.
  4. D65 enrollment leakage during K-5 (rather than at 8→9): Families who exit D65 at, say, 3rd grade for private school will still show up at ETHS in 9th grade. The 8→9 ratio captures all such families regardless of when they left D65.
  5. Boundary differences: ETHS attendance area includes a small slice of Skokie (south of Madison St., roughly) that is in District 73-5 / 68 / 69 for K-8 — those students enter ETHS without ever having been in D65.
  6. D65 students who left Evanston: Families who moved out of Evanston between 8th grade and high school would reduce the ETHS 9th-grade count relative to the D65 cohort. The fact that ETHS 9 still exceeds D65 8 means inflows clearly outpace outflows at this transition.
  7. Reclassified ETHS 9th-graders: Each year, ~30-80 ETHS students who didn’t earn 12 credits as freshmen remain in 9th grade for a second year. These students are part of the official “Total Grade 9” count and inflate the comparison by that amount.

A more rigorous study would separate these factors using individual-level enrollment data (which D65 and ETHS both have) rather than the aggregate counts available in public reports. The pattern shown here is consistent with but doesn't prove a trust-driven private-to-public flow.

What would strengthen the trust hypothesis specifically

  • Survey data showing parent satisfaction declining in D65 over the same period
  • Enrollment counts at the major Evanston-area private K-8 schools (St. Athanasius, Pope John XXIII, Roycemore, Northshore Country Day, Beacon Academy, Chiaravalle Montessori) growing over the same window
  • Anecdotal evidence in board meeting public comment about families exiting D65
  • Data on D65 attrition between, e.g., kindergarten and 5th grade

What would weaken it

  • Evidence that the external gain is mostly driven by Evanston in-migration of high-school-age students (a regional pattern, not D65-specific)
  • Showing that the 8→9 gain has been historically stable (i.e., 20% has always been roughly the case, even when D65 had a strong reputation)

Methodology

  • D65 8th-grade enrollment is taken from the District’s annual 5-Year Enrollment Projections memos to the Board (Table 2 “Actual” column). When two adjacent reports list slightly different numbers for the same year (off by 1-20 students, typically due to late-year reclassifications), I used the contemporaneous report’s value. Source documents: foiagras docs 4317, 3468, 2808, 2144, 1490, 561, 248.
  • ETHS 9th-grade enrollment is from the District’s annual Opening of School Reports (Part 1A “Total” Grade 9 row, which includes reclassified students who are repeating 9th grade for credit). Source documents: foiagras docs 11799, 11575, 11374, 3686, 3495, 2486, 1370, 177. The Total figure includes Main Campus students; ETHS off-campus / day-school students are excluded for consistency with the D65 number, which doesn’t have an equivalent.
  • External gain = ETHS 9th-grade total − the prior year’s D65 8th-grade total. This includes all the categories listed above (private K-8 returners, in-migrators, boundary differences, and reclassified 9th-graders).
  • The cohort labels (e.g., “2024-25 → 2025-26”) indicate the D65 8th-grade school year on the left and the ETHS 9th-grade school year on the right.

The full data file with per-row sourcing is at data/d65_to_eths_cohorts.csv. The chart-generation script is build_k8_to_hs_charts.py.

Acknowledgements

This analysis was prepared by the Legion of Data Nerds with the assistance of Claude.ai (Anthropic), which helped extract and reconcile data across the multi-year district reports and build the visualization pipeline. All source data is from public District 65 and District 202 board meeting documents indexed on foiagras; all editorial decisions, methodology choices, and conclusions are the authors’.