When it’s not his children’s school
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel
There is a great deal of anger among Chicago parents about the city’s plan to close some 50 public schools. Here is a powerful piece from parent Matt Farmer, a Chicago trial lawyer who is a member of the Local School Council at Philip Rogers Elementary School. A version of this appeared on Huffington Post.
By Matt Farmer
Question: When is a Chicago elementary school with 23 kids in a classroom not considered by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to be an “underutilized” school?
Answer: When it’s his kids’ school.
Emanuel plans to close 54 public elementary schools at the end of the 2012-13 school year. The reason, he says, is because the schools are “underutilized.” He bases that claim on an esoteric — and deeply flawed — Chicago Public Schools space utilization formula.
It’s a formula, for example, that will peg a school’s utilization as “efficient” (rather than “overcrowded”) if that school has 36 students in each of its “allotted homerooms.”
Using that same formula, a CPS elementary school with just 23 kids in each of its “allotted homerooms” would find itself on the district’s “underutilized” list, which, in 2013, is the first step on the road to being shut down.
At the mayor’s kids’ school, however, elementary classes are considered “full” if there are 23
