Chicago Public Schools upped the stakes of its legal challenge to state education funding on Monday, warning that the school year could end nearly three weeks early and summer school programs could be cut if the district doesn’t get a quick and favorable ruling.
"These possibilities are deeply painful to every school community," district CEO Forrest Claypool said in a letter to CPS families in which he asked them "to add your voices to this fight."
Claypool told parents the school year could end June 1 instead of June 20 without a fast-tracked, preliminary ruling from a Cook County judge. In addition, CPS said summer school could be eliminated for all elementary and middle-school students except those in special education programs.
The moves are the district’s latest effort to prod Gov. Bruce Rauner and state lawmakers into tossing CPS another fiscal lifeline, but a shortened school year figures to be a tough sell to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who campaigned in his first term to extend the year for CPS students. At a news conference on Monday, Claypool said the district has not come to any final decisions.
"I want to make clear that’s the worst-case scenario," Claypool said of the June 1 date. "It could be any number of days in between or it could be none at all if we are successful on this thing."
Claypool said success would depend on the courts or what’s been billed as a "grand bargain" in Springfield to solve the state’s record budget impasse.
Emanuel’s school board earlier this month accused the state of employing "separate and unequal systems of funding for public education in Illinois" in a lawsuit filed against Rauner and the Illinois State Board of Education. CPS described the legal move as the "last stand" for a cash-strapped district that’s "on the brink."
In its filing on Monday, the district asked Judge Franklin Ulyses Valderrama of the Cook County Chancery Division to issue a preliminary injunction that would prevent the state from "continuing to fund two separate but massively unequal systems of education."
CPS said it would present its case for an injunction to Valderrama on Friday.
Chicago Public Schools restores $15 million from spending freeze to hardest-hit schools Juan Perez Jr.
Chicago Public Schools will refund $15 million to schools hardest-hit by a recent spending freeze, a move that deepens the district’s budget gap and blunts criticism that cuts disproportionately affected schools with mostly poor and minority students.
The reversal by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s school…
Chicago Public Schools will refund $15 million to schools hardest-hit by a recent spending freeze, a move that deepens the district’s budget gap and blunts criticism that cuts disproportionately affected schools with mostly poor and minority students.
The reversal by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s school…
(Juan Perez Jr.)
CPS officials said in the court filing that cuts to summer school and the academic year could save about $96 million, an estimate Claypool said was "as conservative as possible."
At the same time, CPS officials acknowledged that the shortened school year could violate state requirements on the length of the public school year, which could imperil some state aid.
It would also present a significant challenge for school administrators. Nate Pietrini, principal of Hawthorne Scholastic Academy in Lakeview, said the uncertainty created by Monday’s announcement makes it even harder to keep teachers, students and parents positive about the district’s future.
"All that stuff is difficult when you don’t know when your school year is going to end, and you don’t know if you need to reorganize major pieces of your curriculum and major culture-building events within your school," he said.
Hawthorne’s graduation celebration, eighth-grade class trips and year-end literacy celebration ceremony would be at risk. Then there are matters of deciding whether to, for example, condense or eliminate part of the school’s third-grade math curriculum.
"You can move an event," Pietrini said. "You can’t move 13 days worth of instruction."
CPS has been scrambling to fill a budget hole since December, when Rauner vetoed a measure that would have provided CPS with $215 million from the state. The governor argued that the money was contingent on Democratic leaders agreeing to broader state pension reforms.
The district has already instituted cost-cutting measures that include four furlough days, which were scheduled so they didn’t affect classroom time. The district also froze $46 million in school budgets and threatened $18 million in cuts to independently operated schools, only to restore about a third of that money last week after criticism that the cuts had a disproportionate effect on poor and minority students.
The Chicago Board of Education last week approved a $5.4 billion operating budget that includes a shortfall close to $130 million.
State Education Secretary Beth Purvis on Monday said that instead of threatening cuts to the school year, CPS should focus on pushing legislation to overhaul the state’s education funding formula.
"I hope that they would really look seriously at not cutting days from the school year," Purvis said in an interview. "I think people need to understand that the CPS board adopted a budget with a $215 million hole in it. Why is the governor being held responsible for that instead of the CPS board?"
Schools officials presented a grim picture of the potential harm other cuts could bring in Monday’s court filing.
"If CPS ends the school year on June 1 — instead of June 20 — students will receive fewer days of instruction. If students are not in class, they forever lose those days of learning. There is no way to compensate for missed time in the classroom," CPS Chief Education Officer Janice Jackson said in an affidavit.
In a separate affidavit, CPS Chief Financial Officer Jennie Huang Bennett said the shortened school year would save about $91 million, while cutting summer school would save an additional $5 million.
The Chicago Teachers Union issued a statement on Monday that again accused Emanuel and CPS of playing politics instead of turning to solutions to help schools such as raising taxes.
"The mayor behaving as if he has zero solutions is incredibly irresponsible," CTU President Karen Lewis said in the statement. "Rahm wants us to let him off the hook for under-funding our schools and instead wait for the Bad Bargain to pass the Senate or Rauner’s cold, cold heart to melt and provide fair funds."
Claypool would not say when the district would cement a decision to shorten the school year.
"We think it would be wrong to prematurely set a final date for a decision when we still have the opportunity to prevent a shorter school year," he said.
jjperez@tribpub.com
Twitter: @PerezJr
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