County board prez: Why are we closing
schools and packing the jail?
- Ting Shen/Sun-Times
Media
- Cook County board
president Toni Preckwinkle: Chicago's school closings plan is a
"terrible idea."
As the
top official in Cook County government, Toni Preckwinkle didn't have any formal
say in the decision by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his education team to shutter 54 Chicago elementary schools.
But she does have a few thoughts on the
matter. Like: What are they thinking?
"I talked to a member of the
school board that I knew and said what a terrible idea I thought it was,"
Preckwinkle told me in an interview. "You know, schools are community
anchors. They're social centers. They're part of a community's identity. And
often kids go half a dozen blocks and they're in different gang territory.
"The closings are going to take
place almost entirely within the African-American community, and given the
problems we already have with violence, I think it's very problematic."
Preckwinkle,
the county board president, wasn't just venting. The county oversees the local
criminal justice system, and she's made a priority of reducing
the number of people caught up in it—along with
the cost to taxpayers. I had stopped by her office to discuss the recent news
that the population of the county jail has surged
despite her goals. It was disturbing how smoothly the conversation shifted to
school closings.
On Thursday, after months of closure threats,
Chicago Public Schools officials released a list of 54 schools that will be
shut down. The communities they serve are already
struggling with foreclosures, disinvestment, and crime.
About 30,000 students will be affected.
Parents, residents, and aldermen across
the city have fought
the closing plan since it was first floated. Though
schools officials held a series of neighborhood hearings and solicited
community input, Preckwinkle said they couldn't have paid that much attention
to what they were told. "They enlisted local people to help them figure
out what to do," she said, "and then they ignored them."
Preckwinkle also questioned the recent declaration
by Chicago police superintendent Garry
McCarthy that cops would be able to protect
children crossing gang boundaries. "I don't know how the superintendent
can say he's going to keep all the kids safe. I don't know what possessed him
to say that."
Even more troubling, Preckwinkle said,
the closings appear to be part of a broader plan.
"I talked to somebody the other
day I've known for a long time who's in the public school system. Her view was
that things were bad and getting worse, and she wondered whether there was a
deliberate effort to weaken the public schools in order to make the case
stronger for charter schools and contract schools.
"And that is just so demoralizing.
If somebody who's in middle management in the public schools thinks there's a
deliberate effort to weaken and destroy our schools—yeesh."
A Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman
didn't respond directly to Preckwinkle's comments, but officials have argued
that they need to shut down underused schools to help close a $1 billion budget
gap. They say it's part of their ongoing effort to improve the quality of
education in the district, where thousands of students drop out each year, many
before they even reach high school.
"For too long children in certain
parts of Chicago have been cheated out of the resources they need to succeed in
the classroom because they are in underutilized, under-resourced schools,"
schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett said in a written statement.
What no one has disputed is that the
state of the school district is closely related to the city's ongoing
plague of violence. The school closings—like the
shootings—are concentrated in areas with large populations of dropouts and
ex-offenders who struggle to find legal work.
Meanwhile, Preckwinkle says one of the
reasons the jail population has swelled recently is that Chicago police have
responded to the violence with a huge increase in arrests, including for
low-level, nonviolent crimes. Prosecutors are pursuing these cases even though most
end up being thrown out.
She argues there's another way to fight
crime. "We ought to invest a lot more in our public schools. You know,
feed the kids breakfast, lunch, and dinner; have after-school activities; keep
the schools open until nine o'clock in the evenings and on weekends; invest in
things like the Boys and Girls Club and the Park District—I mean, everything,
basically, to dramatically ramp up the investments in our children."
But even in Democrat-dominated Cook
County, it's hard to imagine that happening. "I was at an event last week,
a fund-raising event, actually, where somebody said, 'All my neighbors are
Republicans—people who live on my block who I like, who wouldn't support the
idea you were just promulgating,'" Preckwinkle recalled. "And he said
the people on his block he knew would rather pay to keep somebody incarcerated
than to support music lessons or soccer team memberships or basketball team
uniforms for kids in poor neighborhoods.
"We've got in this country such
distorted values. In the last 30 or 40 years we've invested all this money in
our prison system, and our schools are starving for money."
And no, she says—she's not saying this
in preparation for challenging Rahm Emanuel at the ballot box. "The other
day one of my friends asked me this, and what I usually say is, 'No, I'm not
running for governor, I'm not running for mayor, I'm not running for
dogcatcher—I'm running for reelection for the job I've got.' He was trying to
encourage me to do something else, and I said, 'I've only been in this job for
two and a half years and there's a heck of a lot that needs to be done.'"
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