A coalition of Local School Councils vowed Tuesday to fight budget cuts at their schools even as the Chicago Public Schools said the elected councils have no authority over funding.
Many of the councils represent middle-class communities on the North Side that through aggressive fundraising and parent volunteering turned around once-failing neighborhood schools. Council representatives said staff and program cuts threaten to undo the hard-fought improvements.
Darcy DeWolfe, the Local School Council chair at Burley Elementary in Lakeview, said literacy initiatives that were key to academic improvement at the school are being cut, and the school also stands to lose gym and art classes.
“Fifteen years ago, it was a failing school,” DeWolfe said. “With our literacy focus, we’ve turned it around to be one of the top-performing schools in the district. But now we can no longer afford our reading program. We’re losing our reading specialist, a number of literacy positions. This is all directly at the classroom level.”
CPS released school budgets earlier this month under a new per-pupil funding formula that principals and charter operators said has led to cuts. Raise Your Hand, a parents group, has been compiling a list that now includes 145 schools — more than a fifth of the district — that have seen funding cut by a total of $84 million this year.
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The district faces a nearly $1 billion budget deficit this year and has already approved the closing of 49 underenrolled elementary schools and a high school program.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel has blamed the budget cuts on the failure of state lawmakers to agree on pension reform. At a news conference Tuesday at City Hall, a group of city, county and state legislators from the North Side called on Emanuel to pull money from tax increment finance district funds to help avoid individual school budget cuts.
With those funds serving as a stopgap, the General Assembly could then focus on longer-term solutions that would include addressing unfunded pension liabilities that are draining state resources away from essential services like public education, said Ald. Ameya Pawar, 47th.
The school district countered that one-time fixes like tapping into TIF surplus funds are not enough to solve the district’s $1 billion financial crisis. District spokeswoman Becky Carroll said that from 2009 to 2012, CPS received more than $150 million in TIF surplus. In 2013 it stands to receive another $18 million.
The district has maintained that it has tried to keep budget cuts out of the classroom, and any reductions to programs or staff are primarily due to decisions made by principals.
Blaine Elementary Principal Troy LaRaviere disputed that, saying his Lakeview school stands to lose eight staff members, including a much-valued music teacher, an art teacher and several teaching assistants who focus on improving reading skills in the primary grades. His Local School Council voted against a budget that was cut by $610,000. The newly formed coalition of Local School Councils met Tuesday at Blaine.
“They’re trying to create a new normal, and we can’t let that happen,” LaRaviere said of the district’s budgets.
District officials said that under state law, when a Local School Council fails to approve a school budget, CPS could ultimately step in and appoint a “financial supervision team” to create a budget based on the district’s funding proposal.
“It’s pretty straightforward. What (Local School Councils) can’t do is change how much CPS allocates to a given school,” Carroll said. “They can reject a budget, but the Illinois school code creates a process that can be implemented if needed to move their budget forward.”
Julie Woestehoff, executive director of Parents United for Responsible Education, said the state code is open to interpretation, and the issue could be litigated.
“Budgeting authority is one of the clearest and most powerful tools Local School Councils have,” Woestehoff said. “There would be a political cost to be paid if CPS wanted to take a heavy-handed approach to legitimate complaints from Local School Councils about the resources they’ve been given. If a Local School Council wanted to go the whole nine yards, the issue could end up in court.”