The numbers for the elementary school down the block from my church are discouraging. The latest CPS data for Dulles Elementary School show that just 13.7% of Dulles students are proficient in English language arts and 3.9% are proficient in math. Dulles spends significantly less per student than some districtwide estimates of CPS spending. This is shocking, mind-boggling, and if this isn’t a crime against humanity, then I don’t know what is.
The numbers only get worse. The school spends about $16,200 per student. The Chicago Public Schools district average is roughly $27,000 to $32,000 per student. How is this inequity possible in this age of DEI?
We live in one of the bluest cities in America, and our mayor, Brandon Johnson, brags about having the "Blackest administration" and always talks about fighting White supremacy. And yet he is comfortable with this disparity in school spending? Why aren’t all the White DEI folks on the North Side of Chicago outraged over this inequity?
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On top of this, Chicago Public Schools is staring down a roughly $732 million budget deficit. Just last summer, the district laid off 1,458 employees, including 432 teachers and 677 special education assistants. This year, the board restored proposed cuts in part by assuming an additional $150 million from the state that lawmakers have not committed. But this is not a solution, and it will only lead to more debt.
Now here is what is infuriating to me. Guess how much the city spent on services for the migrants and asylum seekers coming into town between August 2022 and the end of 2024. Chicago’s inspector general found that roughly $639.6 million in city and grant funds was spent on services for new arrivals between August 2022 and the end of 2024. Why weren’t more unrestricted city resources directed toward our struggling schools instead?
I am a pastor. I believe in compassion. But it is morally wrong to assign so many of our taxpayer dollars to non-citizens who came to the United States and are now receiving taxpayer-funded services in Chicago. Every dollar of unrestricted public money spent on one priority is a dollar that cannot be spent on another, including our schools. We can apply the cold tools of cost-benefit analysis here, and I’m always going to take the side of our children. I believe in taking care of our own home first because it puts us on the right footing to extend a strong, helping hand to others. Right now, we are creating children weak in the mind, and in what universe is that moral or right?
What I want to know is why we have chosen to prize the newly arrived over those of us who were born, through no fault of their own, into generational poverty.
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Just a few years ago, nearly every leader in Chicago was chanting "Black Lives Matter!" I guess that was just an empty slogan and they’re insincere people.
Where is the urgent help for the kids who cannot read, the special-needs students who need consistent aides, and the teachers stretched thin every day? If equity means anything, it should start with the children who have been failed the longest in the neighborhoods that vote most consistently for these leaders.
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I don’t agree with their vote, and I’ve told them so. Yet, I have no problem telling Mayor Brandon Johnson, "They voted for you, so why don’t you start doing your job and representing them? Or are they just your pawns?"
If you walk the halls of our South Side schools, you will meet students who cannot read at grade level, special-needs children who need consistent support, and teachers who are exhausted from doing more with less. Enrollment has declined. Buildings are aging. Pensions and debt eat huge portions of the budget. Yet year after year, the deficit returns, and year after year, the conversation turns to everything except the hard choices that put local kids first.
I have spent years in the streets of this city trying to build something better for the next generation. Project H.O.O.D. is about opportunity, not excuses. Education is the foundation of that opportunity. When a district repeatedly faces shortfalls in the hundreds of millions of dollars while hundreds of millions flow to other priorities, the message to our children is unmistakable: You are not the priority.
I do not write this out of anger. I write it out of love for the kids I see every day. They deserve adults who will fight as hard for their classrooms as they fight for every other cause. Until that happens, the view from the South Side will keep showing the same picture: struggling schools, deferred maintenance on our children’s futures, and a city that keeps choosing everything else first.