Local school leaders to CPS: Springfield can’t solve crisis alone

Local School Council members from more than a quarter of Chicago Public Schools are urging city leaders to come up with local solutions to the district’s budget crisis.

As CPS has stared down a $1 billion budget shortfall, city officials led by CPS chief Forrest Claypool have pushed for increased funding from the state to fill a chunk of the yawning budget gap. But lobbying and demonstrations downstate won’t be enough to prevent cuts at city schools, according to restive LSC members from across the city. More than 500 LSC members from 141 CPS schools signed onto a petition demanding action that doesn’t require approval from Springfield including shortening the school day and year; draining funds from TIF districts; and canceling plans to build a new high school to be named for Barack Obama.

“These solutions should be on the table in Chicago,” said Andrea Tolzman, a LSC member at Pulaski International School in Bucktown. “They don’t require elected state officials to make decisions or even to show up at the table. They just require the CPS Board of Ed, CEO [Forrest] Claypool and our elected officials in Chicago.”

About a dozen LSC members held a press conference outside CPS headquarters on Madison Street on Tuesday, announcing their plans to present the petition at the CPS board meeting Wednesday.

Local School Councils are elected boards of parents, teachers and community members, and function like miniature school boards governing individual CPS schools, The ad hoc group backing the petition is “unprecedented” in size, said Timothy Alexander, an LSC member from O.A. Thorp Scholastic Academy in Portage Park.

A district spokesman said lobbying by CPS and parents had built support among legislators to revamp funding formula that would steer more state funding to CPS and other schools with large numbers of low-income students, changes that can’t move forward without support from Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner

“The General Assembly has demonstrated a willingness to repair the state’s broken funding system,” CPS spokesman Michael Passman wrote. “Without willingness from the governor to provide the state’s most vulnerable students with the resources they need and deserve, school districts throughout Illinois will be unequipped to prepare students for a successful future.”

The statement did not mention local revenue sources or cuts suggested by the LSC group.

Claypool mandated cuts at all city schools at mid-year, and has warned principals to hoard cash as the school year winds down, while lobbying the statehouse to revise the state’s school funding formula to favor districts with higher proportions of needy students.

The legislature has dithered on a plan to release any funding to schools amid the wider impasse between Rauner and Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan that has stalled negotiations on the entire state budget.

While Alexander said Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the City Council have failed to do much to help the district while waiting on help from Springfield, he did concede that state help is needed to ultimately resolve the CPS budget crisis.

“Both sides at the state level have been sort of actively engaging in politics rather than actively engaging in solutions,” Alexander said. “We need our legislators to sit down at the table and make the hard choices to fund our schools. The money is out there, we just need to allocate it to our children.”