CPS reverses part of local school cuts the day after major protests against impact on minority schools...
Chicago Public Schools is the only school district in Illinois that has a "Chief Executive Officer" rather than a state-certified superintendent. Again in February 2017, Chicago learned the weakness of having someone with no education credentials or experience running the schools system when CEO Forrest Claypool (above during the Board of Education's February 22, 2017 meeting) implemented budget cuts that impacted minority and poor schools the most. After public criticism of Claypool's latest incompetence, CPS reversed its position... again. Substance photo by David Vance.One day after leading officials -- including the former Vice President of the Chicago Board of Education -- rose up at a Board of Education meeting to protest the impact of the latest budget cuts on minority schools, CPS officials announced that they were returning $15 million to the schools that had been hardest hit. The latest round of budget confusion in the administration of CPS "Chief Executive Officer" Forrest Claypool has been viewed by many, including this reporter, as another example of what happens when an unelected school board and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel appoint a guy (Claypool) whose main experience in government has been in mass transit and parks. Claypool, in turn, was allowed by the seven members of the Board of Education to appoint more than a dozen cronies from his days at the Chicago Transit Authority to the school system's top financial and administrative posts. None of them had any experience or knowledge in schools prior to their being given the jobs, all of which are paying six figures and a couple of which are paying more than $200,000 per year at a time when the city's public schools are supposedly broke and have sued that State of Illinois claiming that Illinois has been discriminating.
But even in the process of explaining and then re-explaining and re-re-explaining the latest budget, Claypool and his "Chief Education Officer" Janice Jackson continued to proclaim absurdities that may as well be coming from the Trump White House's media center. "CPS has cut 'hundreds of millions in administrative costs in the last 18 months alone and will continue to streamline operations, but we can no longer shield the classroom from the State's discriminatory funding,'" Claypool and Jackson stated in a message to principals.
Which can only be described as bullshit.
Even though CPS continues to have a large administrative and bureaucratic budget, there were never -- NEVER -- "hundreds of millions" of dollars in administrative cuts since Claypool was appointed CEO of CPS by Rahm Emanuel. Claypool says that all the time, but it has never been true, and he has never been forced to explain where he got those numbers since the Claypool administration refuses to hold press conferences and answer direct questions when it repeats such lies. Instead, Claypool hides behind the latest person who hands out press statements to Chicago's corporate media on issues that become too hot to handle with evasions.
CPS officials refuse to even provide Substance with regular press updates. Censorship of the press -- and self-censorship by some editors -- leaves statements like the one above unchallenged. Even in the darkest days of the administration of former Mayor Richard M. Daley, CPS regularly held press briefings and CPS officials regularly attempted to explain their various budget claims. That has not been true since Rahm Emanuel became mayor in 2011 and appointed the first of his (so far) five CEOs to run the city's school system, the nation's third largest. (The CEOs have been: Jean Claude Brizard, Terry Mazany, Barbara Byrd Bennett, Jesse Ruiz (interim), and Claypoo). Byrd Bennett has pleaded guitly to federal corruption charges and was supposed to begin serving a prison term a year ago, but it still not locked up.
TRIBUNE STORY PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 25, 2017...
CPS returns $15 million to hardest-hit schools... Money unfrozen after 16 Latino advisers resigned, By Juan Perez Jr.Chicago Tribune
Chicago Public Schools will refund $15 million to schools hardest hit by a recent spending freeze, a move that deepens the district's budget gap and blunts criticism that cuts disproportionately affected schools with mostly poor and minority students.
The reversal by Mayor Rahm Emanuel's school system comes two days after 16 members of a CPS advisory committee for Latino students resigned to protest the effects of the budget freeze, which was part of an effort to make up for $215 million in unrealized state aid.
The district said it didn't know how it was going to pay for the refunds, and also said an ongoing gap in the CPS budget could lead to classroom cuts.
CPS has cut “hundreds of millions in administrative costs in the last 18 months alone and will continue to streamline operations, but we can no longer shield the classroom from the State's discriminatory funding,” CEO Forrest Claypool and Chief Education Officer Janice Jackson wrote in a letter to principals.
The $5.4 billion spending plan approved earlier this week by the school board now features a gap of close to $130 million, officials said. The district is hoping for a budget deal in Springfield that would provide additional funding, or victory in its recent lawsuit that challenged how the state pays for education.
The district ordered a $46 million freeze to school spending earlier this month in an effort to save money without layoffs that would have enraged the Chicago Teachers Union.
But the freeze landed especially hard on schools with largely poor and minority student bodies, prompting a rebuke from Latino elected officials and community members including former interim district CEO Jesse Ruiz.
“After the freeze was announced, we heard strong concerns from members of both the African American and Hispanic communities,” Claypool and Jackson said in their letter. “While we cannot make this freeze equal in all schools, we want to be responsive to those concerns and mitigate the most disproportionate impacts.”
The district said it would also scale back planned cuts to independently operated charter schools, from $18 million to $15 million.
In a statement, the members of the Latino advisory committee who resigned said they wanted to “recognize the effort that City Hall is making to restore critically needed funds for CPS students.”
“However, we are deeply disturbed by the lack of engagement that led to the proposed cuts and disproportionately impacted the lowest Latino and African-American students,” the group said. “The restoration of some of these funds is one small step to remedy a grave injustice.”
CPS originally determined the amount of money schools had to cut in the spending freeze by looking at the money each building held in three accounts: funds received from the district on a per-pupil basis; supplemental state aid meant to help educate low-income students; and federal grant money.
Those state and federal dollars aren't meant to be used on general operating costs and are instead intended to keep class sizes small and support learning programs in schools that have a higher number of low-income and minority students. But schools that didn't have enough money in per-pupil spending accounts had to use the supplemental state and federal dollars to balance their budgets.
If poorer schools or buildings with large numbers of English-language learners had not yet spent their state and federal aid, those schools had more money to cut and were then in many cases hit hardest by the spending freeze.
Claypool on Wednesday said Gov. Bruce Rauner's veto of a measure that would have sent $215 million to the district forced officials to evaluate options that included cutting teachers or an “uneven distribution of cuts from unspent funds.”
Rauner's administration had condemned the cuts, and Friday's reversal won muted praise from the state's education secretary along with a call for CPS to help end an ongoing budget impasse in Springfield.
“We are pleased to see CPS reverse their terrible decision to disproportionally cut money from the budgets of schools that serve low income children who are Hispanic and African American,” state Education Secretary Beth Purvis said in a statement. “Now is the time for CEO Claypool to engage in a constructive process to pass a balanced budget with changes that would help schools across the state, including those in Chicago.”
