Number of half-empty Chicago public schools doubles, yet lawmakers want to extend school closing moratorium – Wirepoints
April 19, 2024
18 Comments
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.
If Mayor were serious about reform, she could fix impoverished South Side real estate with a single act: litigation against dishonest (too-high) appraisals of residential properties in over-TIF’ed regions like Harvey. If single family homes were assessed at fair market value by the legal definition of fair market value (a figure which is lower than the Homestead Exemption), the only property-taxpayers left in Harvey to pay for social services required by law and by their own presence would be the TIF properties which cannabslized these neighborhoods in the first place. Oh yeah, and she also wouldn’t have approved the 2… Read more »
Just words. Chicago residents are easy to fool. She has no realistic plan.
We do get a lot of “words” in this state, don’t we?
Whenever there is actually any action, it always seems to be in the direction of hurting businesses, raising taxes and serving some small subset of the population (usually public employee unions).
Watch what they do, not what they say. Hopefully Lightfoot is different. We’ll see, soon enough.