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We’ve checked our notes. And, yes, the closure of 50 public schools in Chicago by Mayor Rahm Emanuel took place 13 years ago.

Yet some keep talking about the issue as if it happened last year. Not coincidentally, they tend to be members of or otherwise aligned with the Chicago Teachers Union, which has a vested interest in putting the kibosh on more school consolidation despite Chicago urgently needing to shrink its still-vast network of schools in the face of dramatically lower enrollment than was the case when Emanuel took action.

Researchers at the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University just released an analysis associating increased gun violence from 2010 to 2019 with school buildings left vacant by Emanuel’s 2013 closure of 49 CPS elementary schools — interesting timing for such a study given that Chicagoans are about to choose their first-ever fully elected school board. What we gleaned from the study is that empty buildings should be repurposed as quickly as possible, hardly a news flash.

And certainly there’s reason to be critical of Chicago Public Schools’ slow pace of selling or otherwise making use of more of those buildings than it has to date, given that 13 years have passed.

CTU, which finds Rahm Emanuel a useful bogeyman, in early June outrageously blamed the school closures for “kick(ing) off the displacement of 200,000 Black Chicagoans” as the union announced its endorsement for school board president in the upcoming election.

So here’s a question as various parties — including Mayor Brandon Johnson, by the way — persist in relitigating 2013. What would be the condition of CPS now if those dozens of schools were still open?

As ProPublica and Chalkbeat reported a little over a year ago, at that time there were 47 CPS schools whose enrollment was less than a third of capacity. That was nearly double the number in 2013.

Imagine adding another 40 or 50 to that count. The average cost per student last year at these severely underutilized elementary schools was $28,000 as of 2025, according to the Civic Federation. At similarly under-enrolled high schools, the cost per student was $36,000. Districtwide, the cost per student was about $18,700.

On Thursday, the Board of Education will vote on a budget for the upcoming school year that seeks to plug a $732.5 million deficit. Imagine what that shortfall would be without those long-ago closures.

We understand the Emanuel administration’s process was wrenching and arguably didn’t do enough to solicit public input. The fully elected school board should learn from those mistakes as it inevitably will have to consider closures beginning next year when a Springfield-imposed moratorium on CPS consolidation expires.

But consolidation isn’t evil in and of itself. It’s something that regularly occurs in shrinking school districts all over the country. It can be done well or poorly.

As Chicago navigates the district’s significant challenges, you will be able to discern the people who aren’t serious about the future of CPS by their repeated insistence on fighting battles of the past.

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected].

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