Plan for new Chinatown school gets $50M boost from state Legislature
The Illinois Legislature set aside $50 million in a new capital budget approved over the weekend for a new high school to be built on the Near South Side, boosting the hopes of Chinatown residents who have spent years pushing for a neighborhood school to serve their community.
The grant doesn’t guarantee a new school will be built, but it revitalizes an effort that was set back a few years ago when a plan to transform a South Loop elementary school into a high school failed.
Given the cost of building a school in recent years, CPS would need to commit an additional $25 million to $60 million for the project to have any chance of becoming reality. A CPS spokeswoman didn’t answer questions about the state funding Tuesday.
State Rep. Theresa Mah, who spearheaded the proposal in the Legislature, said she’s confident she and community leaders can work with City Hall and CPS to make it happen.
Mah said the new school would ideally bring culturally responsive curriculum and bilingual educational support to immigrant families in Chinatown while also serving working-class families from Bridgeport and the South Loop.
“A new immigrant arriving to this country, they’re going to go to the school that is closest and easiest to navigate,” Mah said. “I would like to see CPS also put more resources into neighborhood high schools and just have good, quality education available for all our kids regardless of their background or economic circumstances.”
Asked if she’s concerned that a new high school could draw resources away from the city’s many high schools that are already under-enrolled, Mah said CPS should rework its funding formula to ensure enrollment drops don’t hurt other schools.
David Wu, the board president of the Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community (CBCAC), has fought for years to have a high school built in or near Chinatown to give families a more accessible option.
Wu said he doesn’t think any one high school would be severely hurt by a new one opening. Wu and fellow advocates have conducted surveys in recent years that show neighborhood kids attend 50 different schools around the city, he said. Dating back decades, Chinatown children have gone as far north as Senn High School in Rogers Park, a particularly diverse school and community where bilingual services are more likely to be found for Asian American families.
“If you plot out all of the locations of neighborhood high schools in Chicago, there’s a big area surrounding Chinatown that has no high school,” Wu said.
That has meant kids in Chinatown have the second-longest commute in the city, behind only Englewood students, Wu said. With the new Englewood STEM High School now open, he suspects Chinatown might now have the longest commute.
While an exact timeline isn’t set for this new school, recent examples make it certain nothing would be complete until a few years from now.
Grace Chan, the executive director of the CBCAC, said she’s hopeful the school could be ready in the next three to four years.
Figuring out a location would be one of the biggest challenges since CPS doesn’t own any land or buildings in the area. Property in the South Loop is especially expensive given its vicinity to downtown, and Chinatown and Bridgeport are both heavily built-up already. Any location would have to be easily accessible by foot or public transit to both Chinatown and Bridgeport residents, community leaders have said.
“It’s very encouraging to have dollars committed, but it’s still going to be a long-term project,” Chan said. “There’s still so many things that we need to do working with CPS and community leaders and parents to make it a reality. But I think now we can start planning, which is very exciting.”