CPS wants to speed up closure of Englewood’s Hope High School

Hope High School, one of Englewood’s last remaining neighborhood schools, was already on borrowed time.

Now, Chicago Public Schools officials say they want to move up the closure date to the end of this academic year. The Chicago Board of Education is expected to vote on the closure, which had drawn the ire of community residents, as early as February.

Hope’s closure has been in the works since 2017 when CPS announced plans to build a new high school in Englewood, while closing Robeson High School and voting for the delayed closure of Hope and two other schools with low enrollment. CPS had planned to close Hope at the end of the 2020-21 school year. But given that all of the school’s students have transferred to other schools, the district now says it wants to close Hope at the end of this school year.

In September, the district opened the $85 million Englewood STEM High School, making it the first new school to open in the South Side neighborhood since the 1970s. Some 400 students registered to start the current school year at the new school, up from initial CPS projections of 300 to 350 teens in the open-enrollment school’s first class.

“Closing a school is always bad. But sabotaging a school so it closes is even worse, and that is the example of Hope High School,” said Stacy Davis Gates, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union.

In a written statement, the union said CPS “starves schools of resources to the point where that neglect serves a justification for school closures.”

”Our union contends that no school should ever be closed in the city of Chicago, which is an action that will not only put student safety and academics at risk, but also further destabilize our neighborhoods.”

Before the school board votes on Hope, two community meetings and a public meeting are planned: 5:30 to 7 p.m. Jan. 14 and Jan. 23 at Kershaw Elementary, 6450 S. Lowe Ave. and 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Jan. 29 at CPS Central Office, 42 W. Madison St.

Contributing: Carlos Ballesteros