The recent closing of 49 schools in Chicago leaves huge institutions where learning once was vacant. Now, I have a lot of reasons why schools should not have been closed, most of them are rooted in best practice research I have done over the years in my policy role on the Chicago Educational Facilities Task force. I also can dispute many of the "financial reasons" schools were closed, and I wish the City would done "rightsizing" in a different way. Nevertheless, this post is around the sacred process we must undertake to find uses for the closed schools many in the community I work in solidarity with, West Humboldt Park, and my home West Englewood.
The vacant school buildings are a huge opportunity to help restore where communities have weaknesses. This is critical community development opportunity, and it is also the decision of the people of these communities affected that must lead the way in these spaces, they are the real investors and the ones that have to deal with the mass closures and will have to manage with whatever decision is made on the future use.
As a mother, I wish there was more in my community for my children to engage around, while the Greater Englewood community has many unknown great resources, there are still many gaps. I am driving in different communities to help expose my children to different activities, Why can't I find these resources in my own community, my family and I and our community deserve it? And my voice and others should lead the way in potentially having new access through our own community with our own property tax dollars that have or are supporting these sacred spaced of education and hope. Here are my recommendations in moving forward with the re-purposing of closed schools:
1. CPS and the
Mayor’s Advisory Committee on School Repurposing & Community Development
should develop community-driven re-use strategies for the closed school sites. Since the closed schools are in low income
communities, these facilities should be re-purposed to anchor development, to promote
the well-being of the community and neighborhood revitalization and
reinvestment. Chicago needs to take the
lead in examining how these communities can re-use these spaces and not necessarily
financial benefits.
2. The City of Chicago
and CPS need to re-examine the communities with potential population growth. Some closed schools should remain in the
school district’s portfolio to be potentially repurposed as another educational
institution, or re-opened in the future as a neighborhood public school as more
families return to these communities.
This requires a careful review of CPS’ population projections to test
those projections against demographic and redevelopment data and trends from
several sources:
o
The Chicago Metropolitan Authority for Planning
(CMAP),
o
Planned and anticipated new housing development
- both public and private
o
Examining potential other new community development
that can create improvement in neighborhood economies and housing values, and
increase the housing demand
o
Data on home purchases and building permits for
home construction and remodeling
o
Analysis of population age cohorts and potential and projected birth rate.
By
gathering more data and doing this review, we can create a thorough analysis of
potential population growth for the next 10 to 20 years.
3. Carefully weigh
the costs and benefits of disposing of closed school buildings. Data show that building a school is much more
expensive than re-purposing an older school building. With that being said, the
cost of needed repairs to each school building as well as past operating costs
also need to be examined. Before decisions can be made about the fate of these
school buildings, CPS needs to be transparent about what is the cost to
maintain these buildings.
Unfortunately, when the Board of
Education voted to close schools last year, up-to-date and accurate data about
these costs had not been released by CPS.
CPS had not completed updating Facility Condition Assessment, and did
not have accurate numbers on the costs of addressing all of its schools’
facility needs. A prime example is the case of the old Ryerson Elementary
building, now the consolidated Laura Ward Elementary School. The Ryerson building had recently been
improved using TIF funds. At the time
the district made its school closings decision, the money spent on the building
was not included in the 2008 CPS Facility Condition Assessment roper that CPS
used as the source of information for determining Ryerson’s fate. CPS has now re-assessed all its school building
condition reports, in according to state law. These new assessments may reveal revised
cost estimates that may be less than CPS originally assumed. There are
practical ways for CPS to be transparent and disseminate this information to
the public, include posting the revised updated information to the “Property
Owned and Leased by the Board” database on CPS’ website. This database was also created as a result of
the 2011 State reform law which the CEFTF, BT, and many other parent and
community groups supported and helped to pass.
4. Community
engagement is key to determining how to prioritize the re-use of our public
school buildings. In Kansas City, Missouri -- a city also wrestling with Re-Purposing
closed, vacant school buildings - the municipality and school district worked
to create an open community engagement process and a transparent set of
guidelines to guide the direction of decision making. Kansas City’s first guideline
is:
“Repurposing will not impair or impede the District’s
ability to achieve Global Ends Policy 1.0. (Support educational mission).”
CPS’ educational vision
includes five “pillars”. Two of the pillars are:
- “Engage and empowered families and communities… identify community partners who can support children growth and learning”.
- Another relevant pillar calls for systems of support to meet student needs: ”Remove barriers to learning with practices that promote children’s health and safety, social and emotional development, school attendance and college and career preparation” .
Like other educational facility plans across the country, here
in Chicago we can use these two principles (pillars) of the educational vision
as the priority goals for how the City and CPS move forward in determining the
fate of our closed and shuttered public schools. For myself --as a resident of
West Englewood – I want to be able to work with my neighbors and fellow CPS
parents in my own community and other communities across the city to examine how
these important and often historic public spaces can be used to “engage and
empower families and communities” and build “systems of support to meet students’
needs”.A meaningful, inclusive and strategic community engagement
process could take shape if we:
-
- Hold local community meetings widely publicized with parents from different communities where respected facilitators can take community input around the pillar’s and more.
- Take that input and synthesize and disseminate the information to community members and partners.
- Use a democratic process such as polls, surveys, and/or a community vote process to determine the values for the best use of these public assets and evaluate the potential proposals, many of which already exist.
In this process, data should be presented in a community-friendly
way that describes the cost to maintain for the building, examples of other
re-use projects across the country, and available data around local community
educational barriers. This would ensure
that those directly impacted have the information to guide the development of values
and criteria for potential re-use. This is similar to how the Chicago
Educational Facility Task force created new legislation by doing a similar
outreach plan to create IL Public Act 97-0474.
Again, like in the case of Kansas City, Missouri, after the
guidelines were announced , their school district conducted a robust community
engagement process to help identify and understand what community members thought
would be the best uses for their closed schools, and leveraged public support
for the plans.
Moving forward, the re-use of Chicago’s closed school
buildings is an opportunity to address the educational vision for the district,
develop the highest priorities, and then carry out a community engagement
strategy that identifies the educational barriers in the communities where the closed
schools are located. Through a community engagement strategy, we can develop both
sound criteria on re-purposing approaches and help develop community proposals
that satisfy the educational vision and support the revitalization of these
communities. But it can not be the old engagement of the past, no buy in, no options that we can not control, and no manipulation. Citizen control and empowerment planning, we must say what are our principles and values are for our community improvement...
