Closing public schools in Chicago became a political hot potato after former Mayor Rahm Emanuel shuttered 50 at once in 2013, creating upheaval in communities and leaving neighborhoods with decaying empty buildings.
But as student enrollment continues to drop, a growing chorus of people say it’s time to do another round.
A moratorium on school closings will lift in January, just as the city’s first fully elected school board is sworn into office. For decades, the mayor controlled the school board and drove decisions about school closures.
But now, the school board president will set the agenda — and whether any school closures or consolidations should come up for a vote.
And at a forum hosted by WTTW earlier the week, the four candidates laid out differing views on how they would approach the issue.
Hilario Dominguez, a former political director for the Chicago Teachers Union, is the only candidate who is pledging not to support school closings. Jessica Biggs, a former principal, and Victor Henderson, a prominent defense attorney, said they would consider closing schools, but only after hearing from communities that would be affected.
Sendhil Revuluri, a former Chicago board member and math teacher, made the case for closing under-enrolled high schools, in particular, because they typically can’t support a wide array of classes and programs.
Chicago Public Schools only closed one small high school in 2013, mostly because closing high schools creates safety concerns. The school district has lost about a quarter of its enrollment in the last decade, and more than a dozen high schools are at 20% or less of their building’s student capacity.
As of earlier this year, Chicago Public Schools data showed one-third of all district-run schools were at less than half their capacity.
Revuluri was on the school board in 2019 serving under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot when Englewood STEM High School opened. The school district was trying something new by phasing out four struggling high schools and assigning students who lived in the area to a brand-new school.
Revuluri said the Englewood STEM principal told him about a student from one of the soon-to-be closed schools who started crying as she toured the new building.
She told the principal: “I didn’t know school could be like this,” Revuluri said.
Her school didn’t have a yearbook club or sports and all the students attended the same classes located in one hallway, he said.
“It’s not about politics,” Revuluri said. “It’s not about budgets. It’s about giving our students a quality educational experience.”
Biggs acknowledged that communities were harmed in the 2013 closings. At the time, she was the principal of a South Side elementary school that took in students from closed schools. She said the process created distrust in the community because “nobody ever came to them and asked what it was they wanted.”
Despite new investments in schools tapped to take in students, a 2018 study found many staff felt unprepared and many children did not feel welcome at their new school.
“I can certainly say that we cannot repeat a top-down mass closure experience,” Biggs said.
But other CPS leaders have tried to get buy-in through community engagement and it has not worked. Chicago parents, teachers and others have vigorously fought closing their schools, even after numerous town halls and meetings asking for their input.
Henderson also said he wanted to ask community members what they think should be done with under-enrolled schools.
“There may be a neighborhood that says, ‘We only have 10 or 15 kids in the school, and we would rather have a Boys & Girls Club so people can have some place to go after school to decrease violence,’” he said.
This also may be unrealistic. While CPS and the city promised to convert vacant schools into community assets, actually delivering on that has proven difficult. Many buildings have fallen into disrepair, making conversion even more expensive. Several neighborhoods are still grappling with empty buildings more than a decade after the 2013 school closings.
Dominguez said that CPS should focus on strengthening under-enrolled schools and bringing services for the community into schools with extra space. He pointed out that some under-utilized schools already have health care clinics.
“In Atlanta, they have grocery stores inside of their schools to address food insecurity,” he said. “Imagine a world where our schools can serve both the needs of the community and our students.”
Mayor Brandon Johnson and the Chicago Teachers Union have promoted a similar program in which schools get extra money to bring wraparound services and programs into schools.
The Sustainable Community Schools initiative is now in 51 schools, but its outcomes have been mixed so far. A Chalkbeat Chicago analysis published last year found that schools in the program have higher graduation rates than those not in it. But absenteeism rose and enrollment dropped.
Dominguez called attention to the detrimental effects of past school closings.
“They don’t save money,” he said. “They don’t improve academics. But what they do do is destroy our neighborhoods by increasing gun violence in the areas around those closed schools.”
Research backs up most of Dominguez’s assertions. It has proven expensive to transition students to new schools and long-term savings are hard to quantify.
When students were displaced in 2013, on average, their test scores dropped and though they rebounded eventually, they generally didn’t outpace their peers, according to a 2018 study by UChicago’s Consortium on School Research.
And a recently released study from the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found shootings increased near schools that closed in 2013 and sat empty.