Willard will come up as the highest performing school in District 65, and Haven the highest performing middle school when you look at stats district wide on the Illinois Report Card (a nice searchable database available on the Chicago Tribune website). The demographics presented there might give you some clues as to why that might be. Willard is not as diverse as some of the other schools in Evanston and one could argue that with a lower percentage of lowincome students, what is created instead is a community of super-involved parents who provide their children myriad opportunites to succeed - and would do so where they go. I haven't heard anything negative about the teachers/programming at Willard, but what I'm finding in Evanston is the general calibur of the teachers/curriculum is pretty standard across the district. One thing to watch in Evanston currently is rumblings about needing to possibly build a new elementary school/create a k-2 school for the whole district/redistrict the whole town due to overcrowding issues. Willard is the one that is anticipated to have the most overcrowding! The problem in Evanston is that the buildings are old and its difficult to add on to them (and there is not a lot of extra $ to do so and taxes are already so high). At Willard I believe that they are putting some stop gaps on their space issues (for example, an art room is now a regular classroom and the art teacher floats), but you may see larger class sizes as a result (and no additional budget for aides, etc).
I too am concerned about Evanston Township High School. I know many who grew up here and graduated from there and loved it, but I think that perhaps times have changed. Its a very large high school and has myriad programs (like the highest # of advanced placement classes in the state or some such). But I was sort of told "well, as long as your kid sticks with the 'good kids' they will be fine"....meaning, i'm not really getting the sense that its one big happy family, rather, there is much self-segregationon and a large gap between the high-achieving kids on one end of the spectrum and then gang/gun issues on the other. The school itself is located in a very challenging area of town. Frankly, we wish to move from Evanston to another suburb that seems to stem its diversity issues within the schools more gracefully, where taxes are not as high, and where the high school is a good chunk smaller (around 2000 students, rather than 3500...)
