| $14 billion to ‘modernize’ hundreds of emptying schools? Junk-rated and perennially mismanaged Chicago Public Schools is at it again. The district says it needs $14.4 billion to address emergency building repairs and to fully renovate all 522 of its public school buildings. That’s 50 percent more money than the $9.4 billion CPS will spend on its 2024 budget. What Chicago and Illinois taxpayers should know is that much of that money would be wasted on hundreds of half-empty schools. Over one-third of the city’s 473 traditional schools are at less than 50 percent capacity. $1 billion alone of that infrastructure spending is targeted for the district’s 20 most-empty, failing schools – all of which are only 5 to 25 percent full and where, on average, just 8 percent of students could read at grade level in 2022. |
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| Take Douglass High School. The school has capacity for 900 students but just 34 kids are enrolled there, a utilization rate of just 4 percent. None of the students at Douglass could read at grade level last year. The 2023 Chicago Public Schools Educational Facilities Master Plan calls for $35 million in spending on infrastructure and upgrades at Douglass. That’s more than $1 million per student. It’s the same story at Manley High School, where just 70 of 1,300 available seats are filled and only 7 percent of students are proficient in reading. CPS says it wants to spend $82 million, nearly $1.2 million per student. The district’s $14 billion request, even if some argue it’s just a wish-list, shows just how divorced from reality the education system’s priorities are. Chicago student enrollment has dropped by 116,000, or about 27 percent, over the past 20 years, leaving 170 of the district’s 473 traditional schools half-empty or worse. Rather than spending billions on upgrades, many of these schools should be closed and sold off. With so few students, empty schools aren’t “community centers” any more, eliminating the oft-used rationale for saving them. And a glance at CPS education outcomes, which we’ve compiled on a school by school level, shows most of these places don’t provide students with the education they need. Just a quarter of CPS students can read at grade level, with results even worse for math. But Illinois lawmakers, at the behest of the Chicago Teachers Union, won’t let the district close a single school. Since Mayor Emanuel closed 49 schools in 2013, the district has been restricted by a series of school-closing moratoriums, the most-recent of which won’t expire until January 2025. So the absurdity at Chicago Public Schools continues. And so does the misuse of your taxpayer dollars. |
