Every year, Chicago Public Schools enrollment drops. Not by the hundreds, but by the thousands — and even the tens of thousands. In 2003, enrollment stood at 434,000. Today it’s 340,658, nearly 15,000 fewer students than the previous year. Plummeting enrollment creates an urgent mission for CPS: Consolidate or close half-empty schools, and reassign resources to maximize the education experience for remaining students.
There’s a hitch, though, a big one. Closing schools is tantamount to political quicksand. That lesson cuffed Rahm Emanuel back in 2013, when after two years as mayor he closed nearly 50 elementary schools suffering from shrinking enrollment.
Blowback was fierce. Parents protested for months, frustrated by the potential severing of bonds they and their children had nurtured with their schools’ teachers, principals and other students. Families from gang-troubled neighborhoods worried that their children would be in danger when crossing gang turf boundaries to get to new schools.
The Chicago Teachers Union summed up the move as “a real horror for people.”
Mayor Lori Lightfoot has inherited CPS’ enrollment plight and faces the same political tightrope that Emanuel had to walk: Right-size infrastructure to make the best use of taxpayer dollars, while doing everything possible to preserve the vital linkage between school and community.
When community takes the lead
In North Lawndale on the West Side, an innovative approach to the problem of underutilized schoolsemerged that showed promise. A proposal to close three underused elementary schools and replace them with a new school has been crafted not by CPS, but by the community itself — specifically, North Lawndale’s Community Coordinating Council and Community Action Council.
The schools that would have closed are each less than a third full. One of them, Sumner Math and Science Community Academy, operates with four of every five seats empty. But support for the plan was far from unanimous in the community. This week, the North Lawndale groups pushing the proposal withdrew it, CPS spokesperson Emily Bolton told us. The groups, Bolton said, “recognized the need for additional community consensus and stakeholder engagement.”
Though the proposal was shelved for now, the idea behind it is worth keeping. Closing neighborhood schools is a hard sell. It’s easy to see why parents seethed over Emanuel’s decision — they viewed it a disruptive incursion into the relationship their community had with their local school. What if, however, the community played a pivotal role in that decision-making?
Empty school buildings
Driving the North Lawndale effort was the realization within the community that underused schools are burdens, not benefits, to the neighborhoods they serve. More often than not, they offer a far less robust array of courses than fully enrolled schools. They waste taxpayer money on heating and maintaining largely empty buildings — money that could be spent on personnel and programming at schools with larger enrollments.
And as half-empty schools bleed enrollment, they lose funding. The district doles out money to schools based on their enrollments. It’s impoverished, disinvested neighborhoods like North Lawndale that have the most to lose. Those communities typically have the most marked declines in enrollment, and consequently less money coming to their underutilized schools.
CPS’ dilemma with declining enrollment and underused schools is existential. Half of the district’s schools are deemed underutilized. It’s a problem that Lightfoot and CPS CEO Janice Jackson cannot shove to the side. They’re at the helm of a cash-strapped budget that simply doesn’t have the wherewithal for propping up largely empty school buildings — and staffing levels from a bygone era. Why haven’t the numbers of teachers been reduced commensurate to enrollment drops? (That’s a rhetorical question).
But keeping the status quo in North Lawndale will only make matters worse. A bare-bones education at underused schools eventually entices parents to move elsewhere. Enrollment takes another hit, and a vicious cycle perpetuates. So while it’s true that closing schools is a political minefield, there is a way out. Involve the community in the decision-making. It gives parents and residents buy-in — and more importantly, a big stake in the solution. North Lawndale should keep working on that effort before it’s too late.
Editorials reflect the opinion of the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board.
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