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.
A status quo budget in a time when a million residents are unemployed, the state is broke, and they’re worried about laying off teachers who are working from home. And then they throw the ‘first responder’ thing in there. What about cutting grants? My park district got a big grant to tear down a perfectly good pavilion in a park to replace it with….a brand new pavilion that looks just like the old one. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars of union labor did it take to build that? This is going to blow up. Some here think that… Read more »