You couldn’t ask for a better — or more infuriating — explanation for the financial implosion of Chicago Public Schools than Sunday’s installment of the Tribune’s “Broken Bonds” series.
To sum up: Chicago Public Schools officials were warned more than a decade ago that demographic trends showed some neighborhoods would see big drops in the number of students who live there. There wouldn’t be enough children to sustain all the schools. What did CPS officials do? They issued billions of dollars in bonds to repair, expand or replace the vast majority of the district’s schools regardless of future needs and without voter input, an investigation by reporters Jason Grotto, Alex Richards and Heather Gillers found.
CPS officials over the years have piled up construction debt, shortchanged the teachers’ pension funds and committed money from tax increment financing districts to pay down debt, all to support a budget and real estate footprint that is unsustainable.
The Tribune investigation found:
* Officials poured $1.5 billion into schools that today are less than 60 percent full. One example: More than $100 million was funneled into 12 schools in East Garfield Park, West Garfield Park and Humboldt Park, communities that, combined, experienced a nearly 50 percent decline in births between 1990 and 2009.
* Overall, CPS invested a staggering $100 million in underutilized schools that were closed this year. About half of that spending happened after districtwide enrollment drops were projected.
Result: Debt payments grow, siphoning money away from classrooms, robbing children of educational opportunities. In 2011, for example, more than a quarter of all unrestricted general state aid provided to CPS paid off old debts rather than funding new educational opportunities for children, the Tribune reporters found.
The system has “not been carefully managed, or you wouldn’t have this mess,” CPS board member Henry Bienen told the Tribune.
The question now is whether there is any hope of managing a way out of this mess. The school system is in extreme trouble.
CPS officials face a projected $1 billion budget deficit next year, much of it from an estimated $740 million teachers pension payment. CPS exhausted its reserves and closed dozens of elementary schools this year. More schools likely would have been on the chopping block next year, but CPS tied its own hands by promising a five-year moratorium on closures.
There are no more rabbits to pull out of the hat. Without massive pension relief, CPS leaders warn, they’ll be forced to make deep program cuts or boost class sizes.
That, of course, is true. But it’s difficult to see how CPS can sustain its operations even with major pension relief. The deficits will continue because the system’s cost structure is too high. That includes too many classrooms for too few students in too many neighborhoods with dwindling populations of school-age children. Meanwhile, other schools in growing neighborhoods are overcrowded. Even with the closings done this year, CPS has a far-flung real estate empire.
Look at the demographic trends: From 2000 to 2010, the population of school-age children in Chicago plummeted by 18.7 percent — from 582,109 to 473,029. That includes children who attend private and parochial schools. CPS enrollment dipped another 3,000 students this year, to about 400,000. That’s down from around 438,000 students in 2003. The trend is unmistakable.
The Illinois legislature has to approve pension changes for the Chicago teachers’ retirement fund. But Chicago has to recognize how much deeper the CPS troubles go. A massive structural spending gap has been masked by the years of skipped pension payments and borrowing. This will require a revamp of the school system’s cost structure on a scale that no one has yet been willing to discuss.
Is that politically possible, given the intense criticism sparked by the comparatively modest effort to close schools this year? It will have to be. Left to fester, this ongoing budget crisis will consume more education dollars and cheat more children of learning opportunities … until the system collapses.
