Union Responds to Mayor Emanuel's Plans to Close More Public Schools

Late Friday, Chicago Public Schools announced that it may shutter more schools at the end of the current academic year, plans the Chicago Teachers Union roundly condemns. CTU President Karen Lewis issued the following statement today:

Our school communities are under siege, mired in a structural deficit that has forced nearly $4 billion dollars in cuts and a growing burden of unsustainable debt since 2011. Instead of addressing the system's chronic funding shortfall, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has baked these lethal cuts into the current school budget, and is invoking "under-utilization" and "student-based budgeting" to continue to defund schools in our neediest neighborhoods, escalating the push-out of students and creating the pretext for even more funding cuts.

If Emanuel really cared about public schools, he would utilize the strengths of the new school funding formula, which is designed to channel a greater percentage of dollars to districts like Chicago with a high level of students who live in concentrated poverty. The new formula prioritizes smaller class sizes, wrap-around services and the concrete financial support it takes to give poor students a leg up to better lives.

The mayor has instead siphoned funds from public education to fat cat projects like River Point and the South Loop Marriott, whose owners neither need nor deserve a dime in public dollars. These distorted priorities drive families out of the South and West sides, where neighborhoods grapple with Great Depression-era unemployment rates, a dire lack of affordable housing and the violence that despair and chronic disinvestment generate.

Chicago's public schools deserve better. We need smaller class sizes; librarians for schools fortunate enough to have libraries; trauma services; art, music and physical education; and special education services for students with special needs. We need an end to the mass firing of Black teachers who have educated generations of children and been economic anchors in their own neighborhoods.

Emanuel would not tolerate the lack of these services or this kind of inequity in the schools that have educated his own children, and the rest of the youth of this city deserve no less.