Chicago proposes large-scale school cuts

Chicago will close more than 10 per cent of its elementary schools as it struggles with deficits including a projected $1bn budget gap for education.

The closures, which must be approved by the city’s board of education by May, include 54 elementary schools and programmes in the country’s third-largest school district.

Chicago is one of a number of major cities including Philadelphia and Washington that continue to close schools to reduce spending. However, Thursday’s announcement was one of the largest of its kind.

Amid lower birth rates and increased popularity of charter schools, numbers at urban public schools across the US have been falling. Officials in Chicago say nearly half of its schools are under-enrolled, with 140 of its 681 schools more than half empty.

Like many US cities, Chicago continues to struggle with slumping revenues after the financial crisis, and has a woefully underfunded pension system. Its main pension funds faced a collective unfunded liability of nearly $27bn as of 2012.

As Chicago moves to make tough fiscal choices, few issues have been as contentious as the potential school closings. They were among causes of a week-long strike last autumn that brought Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s clashes with educators to national prominence.

In November Barbara Byrd-Bennett, chief executive of Chicago Public Schools, began the process of determining which premises to close and consolidate. The district has promised additional resources, including iPads and further funding for science and math, to schools accepting students from those being closed.

“For too long children in certain parts of Chicago have been cheated out of the resources they need to succeed in the classroom because they are in underutilised, under-resourced schools,” said Ms Byrd-Bennett. She proposed a five-year moratorium on school closures after this round.

For too long children in certain parts of Chicago have been cheated out of the resources they need to succeed in the classroom because they are in underutilised, under-resourced schools

Laurence Msall, president of the Chicago-based budget watchdog group The Civic Federation, applauded the decision as one whose short-term costs for relocating students should not overshadow long-term gains.

“The capital investment costs, the operational costs of maintaining many underperforming and under-enrolled schools, are significant,” Mr Msall said.

However, the move has faced fierce opposition from teachers, students and parents at dozens of community meetings in recent months. Critics say that the closures – and many of those the city has undertaken in previous years – target Chicago’s predominantly poor, African-American and Latino south and west sides, where the vast majority of cuts are to take place.

At a press conference at one of the schools marked for closure, Karen Lewis, head of the Chicago Teachers Union, called the policy “racist” and “classist” and said she planned a protest march for March 27.

Speakers at the press conference noted that many of the neighbourhoods affected were where most of the city’s violent gang activity was concentrated, and were the scenes of the vast majority of the over 500 murders in Chicago last year.

Walter Burnett Jr, an alderman on the city’s west side, told the Financial Times he is concerned the closings will force young people to cross into rival gang territory in order to attend their new schools.

“In some [neighbourhoods] you have places that have grudges [between gangs] that have been going on for 30 years,” he said. “The last thing I want to see is that some young people get hurt because we made them go to a school that’s far away from their home.”