“Sign up for Chalkbeat Chicago’s free daily newsletter to keep up with the latest education news. Interim Chicago Public Schools CEO Macquline King, who will become the district’s permanent leader in July, has major challenges ahead of her. The district is facing a projected budget deficit of at least $520 million next school year. At the same time, enrollment is declining, and the chronic absenteeism rate — when kids miss at least 10% of school days — has remained around 40% for the past few years. Another challenge will be meeting the demands of a diverse community with different ideas and needs. One Local School Council member is vehemently opposed to the closure of her severely underenrolled school, but a parent at a nearby high school wouldn’t mind if their schools combined. Many parents don’t want to see cuts at their schools, but one parent leader said she’s interested in seeing where her child’s school can pare back on staffing in order to save money. King has said she plans to engage communities around Chicago to shape her leadership on tough issues. While the Chicago Board of Education ultimately votes on major policies and budgets, King is in charge of proposing and implementing changes, as well as a budget plan. As she settles into the permanent role, parents and members of school leadership teams shared what they would like to see from King. CPS again faces a budget deficit Budget woes and how King will tackle them are a primary concern for parents and educators. The deficit could grow as large as $1 billion, King has said, meaning the district will either have to find more revenue or make cuts before approving a budget this summer for the 2026-27 school year. Overall state funding for CPS has increased nearly $390 million over the past five years. Still, the district is $1.6 billion short of what the state considers adequate funding. Most Chicago adults want the state to provide more money, according to a survey conducted by Kids First , an education advocacy organization. Of the 1,361 respondents, two-thirds want state lawmakers to provide more money. Three-quarters want the corporate income tax raised, and roughly that same percentage want income taxes raised on people earning more than $250,000. But Gov. JB Prtizker’s proposed budget doesn’t do those things and would instead provide a slightly smaller increase in funding than usual for K-12 schools. King has said she will keep fighting for more state money. Earlier this week, she told reporters “everything has to be on the table so that we don’t compromise the progress that CPS students have made.” On the school level, parent leaders told Chalkbeat they don’t want to see cuts to meals, tutoring, extracurricular activities, and arts programming. One of those parents — Princess Shaw, who was recently elected to the LSC and has a daughter at Oscar DePriest Elementary School in the Austin neighborhood — said she wants to take a closer look at whether the school needs all the staffing it has. Jessica Keirns, who is on the LSC at Foreman High School in Portage Park, said King should consider more cuts at the central office level and invest in efforts to prevent long-term expenses for remedial help. For example, she wants schools to be able to hire more librarians, noting some research that links librarians to growth in student literacy. Schools that are well-resourced “should pull [their] weight in the sacrifice,” Keirns said. The district’s relatively new funding formula has moved away from basing funding on enrollment and provides staff positions based on a school’s needs. Many selective enrollment and magnet programs with higher enrollment had aired concerns about cuts under the new formula. “When I hear people complain that they can’t keep their four different foreign languages … they’re forgetting about schools that are only offering Spanish in a place where the majority of the students already speak Spanish fluently,” Keirns said. The district’s growing number of small schools Chicago Public Schools enrollment has largely dipped over the last dozen or so years, with a nearly 3% drop again last fall. That drop has resulted in dozens of severely underenrolled schools, often in aging buildings that are costly to maintain: 43 schools are at one-third capacity, and roughly half of district-run schools are considered underutilized by district measures. A Chalkbeat investigation last year found small schools tend to have less access to a variety of courses and extracurricular activities and are more likely to see higher dropout rates and truancy. But school closures are highly fraught in Chicago, where mass closures in 2013 under then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel left many low-income, Black and Hispanic communities feeling scarred and unheard by the district — and many left the city. Political leaders have since largely avoided addressing the issue. After the board voted to hire King permanently, appointed board member Michilia Blaise said she wants to craft a vision for underenrolled schools “without just closing doors.” For her piece, King recently told reporters that a solution will require figuring out “the challenges” and how “to ensure that all students have a high-quality student experience regardless of where their school is situated.” At Douglass High School in the Austin neighborhood, where only 27 students were enrolled at the start of the year, longtime LSC member Catherine Jones said she is “flatly” against a closure or combining with another school, and she wants more resources for the tight-knit campus she loves, such as a performing arts program. “I would like [King] to sit down and talk to us as LSC members and see what the community would like the school to be,” Jones said. On the South Side, Cecile De Mello, executive director of Teamwork Englewood, a group that advocates for more investment in the Englewood neighborhood, said King should revamp the CPS facilities master plan, which in part maps out building needs, and consider with school communities how to use vacant school spaces instead of closing buildings. Jaciel Cathey, a newly elected LSC member for a school on the South Side, said King should focus on retaining teachers within the same school. She believes having familiar, consistent faces can help build trust with families and keep them in the community, she said. CPS has made various efforts to recruit and retain more teachers within the district, for which rates have slightly improved in the last decade, according to state data. Still, Cathey, who transferred her son from a private school, said families often “don’t know who’s teaching third grade” or “who’s teaching fourth grade” year after year. Chronic absenteeism remains stagnant Before the pandemic, about a quarter of CPS students missed at least 10% of school days — known as chronic absenteeism. Today, roughly 40% of CPS students are chronically absent, a rate that’s remained stagnant in recent years. It’s a critical issue: Lower attendance among middle and high school students is linked to lower grades and test scores, according to a recent study from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. John Boggs, a veteran teacher and now International Baccalaureate program coordinator at Bogan Computer Technical High School on Chicago’s Southwest Side, rattled off a few of the reasons for why kids aren’t showing up: They’re caring for siblings; they’re navigating bad relationships with parents; or they’re just uninterested by their classes. “When you’re looking at the low attendance rate for a kid, there’s a story there, and you just got to find out what it is,” Boggs, who also serves on the districtwide LSC advisory board, said. King told WBEZ in January that CPS doesn’t have a strategy to improve attendance but she is talking to a foundation to help fund a plan. Boggs said under King, the district should work harder to ensure parents know how to access their child’s attendance and grades online so they know when there’s a problem. The district has a web page instructing parents how to use the student information portal, but many families may not know it exists. Several other parents told Chalkbeat that schools should work to build relationships with parents — something the research study links to better attendance. On the West Side, sophomore Stanley Scales transferred to Austin College and Career Academy from a private school at the start of this school year. Scales said he likes his new school, but he’s noticed some kids regularly don’t show up to school, where last year the chronic absenteeism rate was 87%. Austin College and Career Academy is pictured on the first day of the 2025-26 school year. Scales suggested the district should fix up the building, which he’s heard people describe as “depressing.” The nearly 100-year-old building needs almost $90 million in more immediate and long-term repairs, among the costliest bills for West Side schools, according to the district’s most recent facilities master plan from 2023. A 2016 study in New York linked poor building conditions to lower student attendance. “Maybe if they fixed the school up and like, make it more likable for students, maybe they would want to attend school more,” Scales said. Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.
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