CPS’ selective, magnet schools appear to take hit under new equity funding formula

For decades, LaSalle Language Academy on the North Side has offered students from across Chicago daily classes in Spanish, Mandarin and other languages, along with the unique opportunity to go to a public school with kids from different backgrounds and neighborhoods in a segregated city.

But now Local School Council members at LaSalle and several other selective enrollment and magnet schools say they are facing budget cuts next fall. They are grappling with whether they can continue the programming that they say makes their schools — which have no neighborhood boundaries and admit based on lottery or academic requirements — the gems of the district.

“The world language program is fully integrated into every aspect of the curriculum,” said Kat O’Brien, chair of the Local School Council at the Old Town school until last year. “And to strip that piece of the identity away … it is really difficult to fathom the consequences.”

School district officials earlier this month sent individual school budgets to principals using a new funding formula that more heavily takes into account the hardships faced by students in particular schools. Extra positions are being provided to high-poverty schools and a minimum number of positions are going to even the smallest schools to guarantee a baseline of education at every school.

The proposed funding changes come as Chicago Public Schools officials and Mayor Brandon Johnson's Board of Education face a conundrum: They want to address historical cuts and underfunding at neighborhood schools that largely serve students from low-income families in Black and Latino communities, but the school system is facing a budget deficit.

So with no clear sources of new revenue, it appears CPS is redistributing existing funding from some schools to others, based on a WBEZ and Chicago Sun-Times analysis and interviews with school leaders. The district has so far refused to publicly release the budgets for broader analysis.

Jen Johnson, the deputy mayor for education, told WBEZ that the mayor’s office instructed the district to protect programming at all schools, even as it looks to prioritize high-poverty schools.

CPS officials acknowledge some schools will get more and others less, but they insist no category of schools is being hit harder than others. They say to draw conclusions from preliminary school-level budgets would be “inaccurate.”

To bolster their argument, CPS officials stress they added $100 million to school budgets last year after feedback on the initial allocations.

Chicago’s specialty schools feel under attack

But the district is already in a precarious position. Unlike last year when it was flush with federal pandemic relief funds, CPS has a $391 million deficit. And officials have yet to factor in projected raises that could add $100 million or more to that hole after ongoing contract negotiations with the Chicago Teachers Union and other unions are complete. Officials say they plan to maintain the funding that goes into schools and instead find cuts in central office or capital spending.

Parents at selective enrollment and magnet schools were already on edge before the budget season. Amid a bus driver shortage, transportation to these schools, which had been provided for decades, was eliminated last year so buses could take disabled and unhoused students as required by law. Then, the school board in December passed a resolution that called for a shift away from school choice and toward neighborhood schools.

A WBEZ analysis using the new funding formula appears to back up the contention that these budgets have been cut. Two-thirds of the city’s 32 magnet and selective enrollment elementary schools, such as LaSalle, did not receive enough staff positions to keep all current teachers. Schools will receive an additional pot of flexible funding that officials say should be used to make up the difference. But those funds need to cover all sorts of expenses, from recess monitoring to teacher assistants — and some LSC members say they’re inadequate.

Almost all selective enrollment and magnet high schools also lack positions to cover all current teachers, but they’re getting three times the flexible funding as selective and magnet elementary schools, making it more likely they can afford their current staffs.

Stephen Mitchell, LSC chair at Bronzeville Classical elementary school, said the messaging from CPS officials is disingenuous.

“What's coming from officials is, ‘Nothing's gonna change, no schools are gonna be affected.’ … But as a classical school, we see our budget cut significantly,” Mitchell said. He said Bronzeville Classical is appealing the cuts, but if unsuccessful the school might have fewer teachers or instructional aides.

Mitchell said while the narrative is that cuts to these programs will only hurt white, affluent students, each selective enrollment and magnet school has its own story.

“We are a Black school in a Black community that fought for this school and we are being harmed by these budget cuts,” he said.

O’Brien at LaSalle said many magnet and selective enrollment parents want to see neighborhood schools serving low-income students get what they need, but that it shouldn’t be a “zero-sum” game where there are losers.

Demands for greater CPS transparency from the mayor

While CPS officials dispute the concerns and trends identified by schools and the data, they refuse to release school-based budgets until they’re approved by LSCs in late May or early June. Until last spring, CPS regularly released budgets to the media in April.

Without all school-based budgets, it’s difficult to tell how many schools are losing funds or, this year, whether selective enrollment and magnet schools are hit harder than others.

This refusal is drawing criticism from state lawmakers who were already skeptical of the Board’s intent to prioritize neighborhood schools over specialty schools. The House overwhelmingly passed a bill last week that would prevent disproportionate cuts to selective enrollment schools, and also extend a moratorium on school closings until 2027.

“The reason I believe that we need this bill is because at this point, there is zero transparency,” State Rep. Jaime Andrade, Jr., D-Chicago, said on the House floor last week.

“They have become the epitome of what they fought against,” he said.

Even the Chicago Teachers Union, the mayor’s ally, said it doesn’t have enough information from CPS to assess whether the budget is a win.

“What’s in place now hasn’t been thoroughly unpacked, even to us, to understand whether there are mass benefits,” said CTU President Stacy Davis Gates.

Behind CPS’ new funding formula

In shifting resources to high-poverty schools, the district is responding to pressure from Black and Latino parents and activists in low-income communities who have derided the lack of basics in neighborhood schools while others have robust programs.

About 75% of students bypass their neighborhood high school, but some have argued more families would choose those schools if they had better programs.

State Rep. Lilian Jiménez, D-Chicago, told the House that her son attends a West Side neighborhood school where she was “pleased to know the direction” of the new funding system.

“Our 100% low income school with 200 newcomers, with over 200 students that are unhoused attending one school,” she said. “We finally, next year, are going to have one nurse and two counselors because this new funding model is looking to see what [are] the needs in the school.”

Many thought the old approach was, as Davis Gates puts it, “grossly inequitable.” That gave schools pots of money based on enrollment and hurt schools as they lost students — mostly in Black communities.

The school district in recent years started moving away from student-based budgeting and gave these low-enrollment schools grants to maintain a base level of programming.

The new funding formula pushes those efforts further by considering how many kids live in poverty, are unhoused, learning English or disabled, plus it factors in race, education, health and other community factors.

Many thought CPS would follow the state’s lead after it adopted this type of needs-based approach in 2018. The state said no districts would lose funding. Instead, the state created a baseline funding amount for what districts need to provide an adequate education. And as funding increased, money went to those districts.

CPS Chief Budget Officer Mike Sitkowski said the district is moving toward that evidence-based model. But with the state estimating CPS needs $1.1 billion more per year to be adequately funded, he doesn’t think it’s feasible to set adequacy targets if funding isn’t increasing.

“That’s the challenge for us as a district,” Sitkowski said. “We are missing out on a billion dollars in revenue.”

Sarah Karp covers education for WBEZ.
Nader Issa covers education for the Chicago Sun-Times.