Number of half-empty Chicago public schools doubles, yet lawmakers want to extend school closing moratorium – Wirepoints
April 19, 2024
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A set of state lawmakers want to extend CPS’ current school closing moratorium to February 1, 2027 – the same year CPS is set to transition to a fully-elected school board. That means schools like Manley High School, with capacity for more than 1,000 students but enrollment of just 78, can’t be closed for anther three years. The school spends $45,000 per student, but just 2.4% of students read at grade level.
Hopefully, all media will get the message, in Illinois, too.
Ted joined Tom Miller of WJPF to talk about Illinois’ highest-in-the-nation property taxes, why lawmakers don’t want to touch the tax’s cost drivers, just how much Illinoisans’ tax burden has grown over the decades, why Gov. Pritzker failed to meet his promise to reform property taxes, and more.
And what culture used to occupy the land now known as “The Puerto Rico Town neighborhood”…. do they get a cultural marker? Here used to live the Czechs and Poles and the Germans, and these 100 year old buildings were built with their hands, but now their descendants have all fled Illinois…
Puerto Rico Town is in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago.
There is $200 Billion in state and local pension and retiree healthcare debt in Illinois. That is net pension liabilities aka unfunded pension liabilities. And net OPEB liabilities aka unfunded OPEB liabilities; also know as retiree healthcare. OPEB = Other Post Employment Benefits (primarily retiree healthcare). Yet the state has time and money to create a new law and implement “state designated cultural districts.” That is Senate Bill 1827 (SB 1827) which was signed into law as Public Act 102-0628 (PA 102-0628) by Governor JB Pritzker on August 27, 2021. Simplified, the State’s motto is, when in massive debt, find… Read more »
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Stay tuned here for the new, independent estimate on that. (Hint: It’s not $200B.) More coming soon.
Mark-Don’t forget that when you come up with the new estimates for unfunded liabilities that life expectancy tables have come down. In many cases for various groups they are down a few years.
https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/national/coronavirus/new-research-estimates-life-expectancy-in-us-reduced-due-to-covid
Problem is in trying to figure out liabilities is that the public sector workers generally have much better health insurance (usually Cadillac plans) than some of the general public who are the ACA/private insurance programs so the public sector workers numbers may not have changed much vs the general public.
Thanks Freddy. We are looking into that.