CPS’ SELECTIVE, MAGNET SCHOOLS APPEAR TO TAKE HIT UNDER NEW FUNDING FORMULA
For decades, LaSalle Language Academy on the North Side has offered students from across Chicago daily classes in Spanish, Mandarin and other languages, along with the unique opportunity to go to a public school with kids from different backgrounds and neighborhoods in a segregated city.
But now Local School Council members at LaSalle and several other selective enrollment and magnet schools say they are facing budget cuts next fall. They are grappling with whether they can continue the programming that they say makes their schools — which have no neighborhood boundaries and admit based on lottery or academic requirements — the gems of the district.
“The world language program is fully integrated into every aspect of the curriculum,” said Kat O’Brien, chair of the Local School Council at the Old Town school until last year. “And to strip that piece of the identity away … it is really difficult to fathom the consequences.”
School district officials earlier this month sent individual school budgets to principals using a new funding formula that more heavily takes into account the hardships faced by students in particular schools. Extra positions are being provided to high-poverty schools and a minimum number of positions are going to even the smallest schools to guarantee a baseline of education at every school.
The proposed funding changes come as Chicago Public Schools officials and Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Board of Education face a conundrum: They want to address historical cuts and underfunding at neighborhood schools that largely serve students from lowincome families in Black and Latino communities, but the school system is facing a budget deficit.
So with no clear sources of new revenue, it appears CPS is redistributing existing funding from some schools to others, based on a WBEZ and Chicago Sun-Times analysis and interviews with school leaders. The district has so far refused to publicly release the budgets for broader analysis.
Jen Johnson, the deputy mayor for education, told WBEZ that the mayor’s office instructed the district to protect programming at all schools, even as it looks to prioritize high-poverty schools.
CPS officials acknowledge some schools will get more and others less, but they insist no category of schools is being hit harder than others. They say to draw conclusions from preliminary school-level budgets would be “inaccurate.”
To bolster their argument, CPS officials stress they added $100 million to school budgets last year after feedback on the initial allocations.
Chicago’s specialty schools feel under attack
But the district is already in a precarious position. Unlike last year when it was flush with federal pandemic relief funds, CPS has a $391 million deficit. And officials have yet to factor in projected raises that could add $100 million or more to that hole after ongoing contract negotiations with the Chicago Teachers Union and other unions are complete.
Officials say they plan to maintain the funding that goes into schools and instead find cuts in central office or capital spending.
Parents at selective enrollment and magnet schools were already on edge before the budget season. Amid a bus driver shortage, transportation to these schools, which had been provided for decades, was eliminated last year so buses could take disabled and unhoused students as required by law. Then, the school board in December passed a resolution that called for a shift away from school choice and toward neighborhood schools.
A WBEZ analysis using the new funding formula appears to back up the contention that these budgets have been cut. Two-thirds of the city’s 32 magnet and selective enrollment elementary schools, such as LaSalle, did not receive enough staff positions to keep all current teachers. Schools will receive an additional pot of flexible funding that officials say should be used to make up the difference. But those funds need to cover all sorts of expenses, from recess monitoring to teacher assistants — and some LSC members say they’re inadequate.
Almost all selective enrollment and magnet high schools also lack positions to cover all current teachers, but they’re getting three times the flexible funding as selective and magnet elementary schools, making it more likely they can afford their current staffs.
Stephen Mitchell, LSC chair at Bronzeville Classical elementary school, said the messaging from CPS officials is disingenuous.
“What’s coming from officials is, ‘Noth