Newly released Chicago Police records indicate Chicago Public Schools’ top security official denied detectives access to school video surveillance footage at a high school where a former student shot four others and that the school’s principal discouraged a witness from cooperating with homicide investigators the afternoon of the shooting. 

The shooting, outside Benito Juarez Community Academy in Pilsen just before Christmas 2022, left two students dead and two wounded. Illinois Answers Project previously reported on delays in sharing information by school officials the afternoon of the shooting and over the following weeks. 

The records, obtained by Illinois Answers, show in greater detail the extent to which police say CPS Chief of Safety and Security Jadine Chou and Juarez Principal Juan Carlos Ocon did not provide critical access during the homicide investigation at Juarez High School. 

Chou and Ocon “refused to allow CPD to view the exterior/interior surveillance cameras from their facility which possibly contained footage of the incident and the armed offender fleeing on foot,” according to the reports.

When police tracked down the witness school officials sent home, five days after the shooting, the witness told police they “told school staff that (they) wished to speak to police about what (they) saw but (were) discouraged by the school’s principal.” 

The witness had been “sequestered” in an office by the school’s principal, according to the records, and that witness’ account of the shooting became the one that prosecutors relied on in charging the 16-year-old former Juarez student with murder. 

A spokeswoman for CPS said that “CPS provided the name of the suspect and directed police to access video footage at the city’s nearby emergency center (the Office of Emergency Management and Communications) within the first hours of the police investigation.” 

The records show detectives asking Ocon, Chou, and other school officials for access to school video. One investigator explained that “time is of the essence to review the video related to this incident and evidence related to this incident may have already been lost due to the delay in accessing the video surveillance system.” 

He told one Juarez administrator that the video could show which way the shooter ran, location of footprints in the snow, that other evidence may be lost due to snow accumulation, that video could confirm the description of the shooter, help guide detectives in determining where to seek interviews or other surveillance footage, help locate a gun or clothing that may have been discarded, or help detectives understand if the shooter got in a car or went into a building following the attack. 

The police report states another Juarez administrator told detectives, “You’ll get it when you get it.” The names of both administrators are redacted in the police report.

Chou is the district’s top safety and security official, a position she’s held since 2011, and her work includes developing and implementing district-wide school safety policy. 

In an interview in May, she denied doing anything to impede the homicide investigation. She said that “it is incomprehensible that anyone would think that we, anyone else, me, anyone around me, would want to do anything to block … would block or delay or forestall progress on an investigation.”

Chou noted in the interview that detectives were eventually able to access the video.   

Chou said in an interview this week that she stopped detectives from accessing the video the day of the shooting because the mother of the student witness told school officials she didn’t want to talk with police. The witness “was in the camera room,” and school officials weren’t “able to let the witness out of the camera room because dozens of police were outside the door and wouldn’t move,” Chou said. 

That’s why CPS and CPD were at “a standstill,” Chou said. 

Chou said the witness’s mother told school officials, in Spanish, that they wanted to leave. She said the family was visibly traumatized — the witness by what she saw and the mother for her daughter — and it “makes sense” that they wouldn’t want to talk with detectives. 

“My recollection is she spoke in Spanish, was in the room literally where they were translating and asking and (the mother) said, ‘no.’ That was because they were … scared and they did not strike me as people who were like, ‘Please, we’re ready to talk to CPD.’ It makes sense they said ‘no.’ I will go to my grave with that.” 

But according to records released by police, the witness’s mother told detectives that school officials told her “she should go home and take some time before speaking with police.” The witness had already provided information about the shooter to school officials and had told other school officials that they “wished to speak to police about what (they) saw.”  

“(The witness) and (their) mother agreed to continue assisting with this investigation and meet with members of the Cook County state’s attorney’s ooffice,” according to the police reports.

Ocon didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

Eight weeks after the shooting, a former student, expelled for behavior and attendance problems, was arrested and charged with murder and attempted murder. Last week, he pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to 46 years in prison. Prosecutors said he was involved in another shooting the day of his arrest, and the reports released after his conviction tie the gun from the Juarez homicide to another shooting weeks earlier.

Illinois Answers has not named the gunman since he was a minor when he committed the crime. 

On the day of the shooting, the student witness told a school administrator the name of the shooter, and the administrator then gave a sheet of paper with information about the boy to the school’s principal, who would not give the information to investigators, according to police records. The records show detectives explained the situation to at least three Chicago Police Department deputy chiefs at the scene, who were unable to get Ocon or other CPS officials to share the paper. 

Chou said the district’s then-deputy general counsel, Ruchi Verma, told her they could not turn over the piece of paper itself. Verma is now the district’s general counsel. So Chou wrote down the name and information that was on the paper and gave it to police.

The district’s policy, and state and federal law, all appear to allow district officials to share information during health and safety emergencies. Attorneys for CPS and CPD discussed those laws after the department’s chief of detectives, Brendan Deenihan, summarized the resistance detectives encountered for CPD’s chief attorney.

The dispute at the scene set off a months-long back-and-forth over how and when detectives are to investigate violent crime where students are victims or offenders. Records show Chou and other school officials sought urgent changes to school policy after shooting, citing “recent experiences in the field,” though nothing was formalized. Police sources said an informal arrangement now exists and detectives who investigated shootings at or near high schools at the end of January were able to quickly access school surveillance footage. 

The newly released records also show how school officials responded to detectives who’d raised concerns with their supervisors and with police department lawyers about CPS’ response to the shooting. Weeks after the shooting, after a detective in the case threatened the school’s principal with a grand jury subpoena due to  his lack of cooperation, Juarez school officials and district legal staff met with detectives at Juarez and admitted “procedural and strategic errors on the day of the incident,” according to the police records. 

Chou, in the interview this week, said she doesn’t “remember anyone conceding anything.”

The district’s lawyers, in that meeting, told school officials to “cooperate fully with (detectives) and this homicide investigation.” 

Ocon, the school’s principal, told detectives “he has been a principal for 15 years” and said he contacted CPS’ legal office for guidance because “he’s been ‘indoctrinated’ to proceed in certain ways when dealing with police and that he’s not going to change his way. (He) did not clarify what he meant.”

In the weeks after the shooting, police discussed charging Ocon with obstruction of justice but eventually decided not to proceed. CPS did not discipline Ocon nor conduct a formal review of school officials’ actions after the shooting.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capitol News Illinois. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

It was on L.J.’s 11th birthday, in December 2022, that child welfare workers finally took him away. They arrived at his central Illinois home to investigate an abuse allegation and decided on the spot to remove the boy along with his baby brother and sister — the “Irish twins,” as their parents called them.

His mother begged to keep the children while her boyfriend told child welfare workers and the police called to the scene that they could take L.J.: “You wanna take someone? Take that little motherf—– down there or wherever the f— he is at. I’ve been trying to get him out of here for a long time.”

By that time, L.J. told authorities he hadn’t been in a classroom for years, according to police records. First came COVID-19. Then, in August 2021 when he was going to have to repeat the third grade, his mother and her boyfriend decided that L.J. would be homeschooled and that they would be his teachers. In an instant, his world shrank to the confines of a one-bedroom apartment in the small Illinois college town of Charleston — no teachers, counselors or classmates.

In that apartment, L.J. would later tell police, he was beaten and denied food: Getting leftovers from the refrigerator was punishable by a whipping with a belt; sass was met with a slap in the face.

L.J. told police he got no lessons or schoolwork at home. Asked if he had learned much, L.J. replied, “Not really.”

Reporters are using the first and middle initials of the boy, who is now 12 and remains in state custody, to protect his identity.

While each state has different regulations for homeschooling — and most of them are relatively weak — Illinois is among a small minority that places virtually no rules on parents who homeschool their children: The parents aren’t required to register with any governmental agency, and no tests are required. Under Illinois law, they must provide an education equivalent to what is offered in public schools, covering core subjects like math, language arts, science and health. But parents don’t have to have a high school diploma or GED, and state authorities cannot compel them to demonstrate their teaching methods or prove attendance, curriculum or testing outcomes.

The Illinois State Board of Education said in a statement that regional education offices are empowered by Illinois law to request evidence that a family that homeschools is providing an adequate course of instruction. But, the spokesperson said, their “ability to intervene can be limited.”

Educational officials say this lack of regulation allows parents to pull vulnerable children like L.J. from public schools then not provide any education for them. They call them “no schoolers.”

No oversight also means children schooled at home lose the protections schools provide, including teachers, counselors, coaches and bus drivers — school personnel legally bound to report suspected child abuse and neglect. Under Illinois law, parents may homeschool even if they would be disqualified from working with youth in any other setting; this includes parents with violent criminal records or pending child abuse investigations, or those found to have abused children in the past.

The number of students from preschool to 12th grade enrolled in the state’s public schools has dropped by about 127,000 since the pandemic began. Enrollment losses have outpaced declines in population, according to a report by Advance Illinois, a nonprofit education policy and advocacy organization. And, despite conventional wisdom, the drop was also not the result of wealthier families moving their children to private schools: After the pandemic, private school enrollment declined too, according to the same report.

In the face of this historic exodus from public schools, Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica set out to examine the lack of oversight by education and child welfare systems when some of those children disappear into families later accused of no-schooling and, sometimes, abuse and neglect.

Reporters found no centralized system for investigating homeschooling concerns. Educational officials said they were ill equipped to handle cases where parents are accused of neglecting their children’s education. They also said the state’s laws made it all but impossible to intervene in cases where parents claim they are homeschooling. Reporters also found that under the current structure, concerns about homeschooling bounce between child welfare and education authorities, with no entity fully prepared to step in.

“Although we have parents that do a great job of homeschooling, we have many ‘no schoolers’” said Angie Zarvell, superintendent of a regional education office about 100 miles southwest of Chicago that covers three counties and 23 school districts. “The damage this is doing to small rural areas is great. These children will not have the basic skills needed to be contributing members of society.”

Regional education offices, like the one Zarvell oversees, are required by law to identify children who are truant and try to help get them back into school.

But once parents claim they are homeschooling, “our hands are tied,” said Superintendent Michelle Mueller, whose regional office is located about 60 miles north of St. Louis.

Even the state’s child welfare agency can do little: Reports to its child abuse hotline alleging that parents are depriving their children of an education have multiplied, but the Department of Children and Family Services doesn’t investigate schooling matters. Instead, it passes reports to regional education offices.

Todd Vilardo, who since 2017 has been superintendent of the school district where L.J. was enrolled, said he is seeing more and more children outside of school during the day. He wonders, “‘Aren’t they supposed to be in school?’ But I’m reminded that maybe they’re homeschooled,” said Vilardo, who has worked in the Charleston school district for 33 years. “Then I’m reminded that there are very few effective checks and balances on home schools.”

“A Huge Crack in Our System”

There’s no way to determine the precise number of children who are homeschooled. In 2022, 4,493 children were recorded as withdrawn to homeschool, a number that is likely much higher because Illinois doesn’t require parents to register homeschooled children. That is a little more than double the number a decade before.

In late fall of 2020, L.J. was one of the kids who slipped out of school. After a roughly five-month hiatus from the classroom during the pandemic, L.J.’s school resumed in-person classes. The third grader, however, was frequently absent.

At home, tensions ran high. In the 640-square-foot apartment, L.J.’s mother, Ashley White, and her boyfriend, Brian Anderson, juggled the demands of three children including two born just about 10 months apart.

White, now 31, worked at a local fast-food restaurant. Anderson, now 51, who uses a wheelchair, had applied for disability payments. Anderson doesn’t have a valid driver’s license. The family lived in a subsidized housing complex for low-income seniors and people with disabilities.

In an interview with reporters in late February, 14 months after L.J. had been taken into custody by the state, the couple offered a range of explanations for why he hadn’t been in school. L.J. had been suspended and barred from returning, they said, though school records show no expulsion. They also said they had tried to put L.J. in an alternative school for children with special needs, but he didn’t have a diagnosis that qualified him to attend.

The couple made clear they believed that L.J. was a problem child who could get them in trouble; they said they thought he could get them sued. In the interview, Anderson called L.J. a pathological liar, a thief and a bad kid.

“I have 11 kids, never had a problem with any of them, never,” Anderson said. “I’ve never had a problem like this,” he said of L.J. The boy, he said, lacked discipline and continued to get “worse and worse and worse every year” he’d known him.

To support the idea that L.J. was combative, White provided a copy of a screenshot taken from a school chat forum in which the boy cursed at his schoolmates.

At the end of the school year, in spring 2021, the principal told White and Anderson that the boy would have to repeat the third grade. Rather than have L.J. held back, the couple pulled him out of school to homeschool. They didn’t have to fill out any paperwork or give a reason.

On any given day in Illinois, a parent can make that same decision. That’s due to a series of court and legislative decisions that strengthened parents’ rights against state interference in how they educate their children.

In 1950, the Illinois Supreme Court heard a case involving college-educated parents who kept their 7-year-old daughter at home. Those parents, Seventh-day Adventists, argued that a public school education produced a “pugnacious character” and believed the mother was the best teacher and nature was the best textbook. The judges ruled in their favor, finding that, in many respects under the law, homeschools are essentially like private schools: not required to register kids with the state and not subject to testing or curriculum mandates.

In 1989, the legislature voted to change how educational neglect cases are handled. Before the vote, DCFS was allowed to investigate parents who failed to ensure their child’s education just as it does other types of neglect. In a bipartisan vote, the General Assembly changed that, in part to reduce caseloads on DCFS — which has been overburdened and inadequately staffed for decades — and also in response to concerns about state interference from families who homeschool.

Since then, DCFS has referred complaints about schooling that come in to its child abuse hotline over to regional offices of education. The letter accompanying the educational neglect referral form ends with: “This notice is for your information and pursuit only. No response to this office is required.”

Tierney Stutz, executive deputy director at DCFS, said that regional education officials are welcome to report back findings, but that “DCFS does not have statutory authority to act on this information.”

“Unfortunately, this is a huge crack in our system,” said Amber Quirk, regional superintendent of the office of education that covers densely populated DuPage County in the Chicago suburbs.

To see how this system is working, reporters obtained more than 450 of these educational neglect reports, representing over a third of the more than 1,200 forwarded by DCFS over three years ending in 2023. About 10% of them specifically cited substandard homeschooling claims. But officials said that in many of the other reported cases of kids out of school, they found that families also claimed they were homeschooling.

Faced with cases of truancy or educational neglect, county prosecutors can press charges against parents. But if they do, parents can lean on Illinois’ parental protections when they defend themselves in court from a truancy charge.

That’s been the experience of Dirk Muffler, who oversees truancy intervention at a regional office of education covering five counties in west-central Illinois. “We’ve gone through an entire truancy process, literally standing on the courthouse steps getting ready to walk in to screen a kid into court and the parents say, ‘We are homeschooling.’ I have to just walk away then.”

More recently, the ISBE made one more decision to loosen the monitoring of parents who homeschool: For years, school districts and regional offices distributed voluntary registration forms to families who homeschool, some of whom returned them. Then last year, the state agency told those regional offices that they no longer had to send those forms to ISBE.

“The homeschool registration form was being misinterpreted in some instances that ISBE was reviewing or approving homeschool programs, which it does not have statutory authority to do,” an ISBE spokesperson told the news organizations.

Over the years, the legislature has taken up proposals to strengthen the state’s oversight of homeschooling. In 2011, lawmakers considered requiring parents to notify their local school districts of their intent to homeschool, and in 2019 they considered calling for DCFS to inspect all homeschools and have ISBE approve their curriculum.

Each time, however, the state’s strong homeschooling lobby, mostly made up of religious-based organizations, stepped in.

This March, under sponsorship of the Illinois Christian Home Educators, homeschoolers massed at the state Capitol as they have for decades for Cherry Pie Day, bringing pies to each of the state’s 177 lawmakers.

Kirk Smith, the organization’s executive director and former public school teacher, summed up his group’s appeal to lawmakers: “All we want is to be left alone. And Illinois has been so good. We have probably the best state in the nation to homeschool.”

“Nobody Knows. He’s Not in School.”

Just days after child protection workers took 11-year-old L.J. into protective custody on his birthday, a 9-year-old homeschooled boy, 240 miles away, disappeared and was missing for months before police went looking for him.

Though the case of Zion Staples was covered in the media, it has not been previously reported that his homeschooling status delayed the discovery of his death.

Zion had been living in Rock Island, in the northwest part of the state, with his mother, Sushi Staples. The family had a long history of abuse and neglect investigations by DCFS, and Staples had lost two kids to foster care in Illinois nearly two decades before because she mistreated them; the children were not returned to her. The most recent investigation by DCFS was in 2021. The department did not find enough evidence to find mistreatment and the case was closed.

Despite her past involvement with child welfare services, no Illinois laws restricted her from homeschooling the children who remained in her care, including Zion and five others who were then ages 8 to 14.

When reporters asked DCFS for his schooling status, the agency’s responses revealed considerable confusion about where he was being educated. DCFS originally told the news organizations that Zion was enrolled in an online school program, but the company that DCFS said had been providing his schooling told reporters that Zion had never been enrolled. DCFS later clarified that his mother said he was leaving public school in August 2021 to attend an online program, but no one was required to verify this information.

On a December morning in 2022, Staples told police she returned home from running errands and found Zion dead. A coroner would later find that he died from an accidental, self-inflicted shot fired from a gun the children found in the house. His mother hid the body and later confided to her friend, Laterrica Wilson, that she did it because she did not want to risk losing her other children.

“She said: ‘Nobody knows. He’s not in school. He’s homeschooled. I’ve got this figured out,’” Wilson recalled in an interview with a reporter about a conversation she had with Staples a few months after the child had died. “She said she had too much to lose.”

Wilson, who lives in Florida, said it was one of several calls she had with Staples over the course of months as she tried to figure out what had happened and what to do about it. Police records indicate that in July, in response to a call from Wilson, they visited the home. Staples denied the child even existed. Later, when police executed a search warrant, officers found Zion’s body in a metal trash can in the garage; he was still wearing his Spiderman pajama bottoms. He’d been dead for seven months, an autopsy revealed.

Staples was charged with concealing a death, failure to report the death of a child within 24 hours and obstructing justice. Staples pleaded guilty to felony endangering the health of a child in February and was sentenced to two years in prison in April.

Staples did not respond to a letter sent to her in prison seeking comment on this case.

DCFS and its university partners study all sorts of risks to children involved with the child welfare system, but they’ve never examined homeschooling and do not track the number of children the agency comes in contact with who are homeschooled. While the agency’s inspector general is required to file reports on every child who dies in foster care or whose family the agency had investigated within the preceding year of the child’s death, the children’s schooling status is rarely noted in them.

For L.J., homeschooling rules also blinded school officials to abuse he suffered, although their administrative office is within sight of his apartment complex. About five months passed from when he was withdrawn to homeschool in the summer of 2021 before the first signs of help arrived. Following a call to its hotline in January 2022, DCFS found White and Anderson neglectful, citing inadequate supervision, but that did not result in L.J. returning to school. DCFS offered services, but Anderson and White declined.

DCFS received more calls to its hotline in June 2022 and again that September, alleging that Anderson and White had mistreated L.J. In both of those cases, DCFS investigators did not find enough evidence to support those allegations and closed the cases.

The caller in September told DCFS the boy appeared malnourished. L.J. hadn’t been in school since 2019, the caller reported. But DCFS said they did not pursue an investigation into his schooling matters because it wasn’t in their policies to do so.

It did send an educational neglect report to Kyle Thompson, the superintendent of schools overseeing the regional office of education in Charleston. The form didn’t mention physical abuse, but it did say that L.J. had begged for food from neighbors, that doctors were concerned about his weight and that a DCFS caseworker had recently visited the home but no one had answered the door.

Thompson was in his office when the educational neglect report ended up on his desk on an October afternoon. Alarmed when he read the allegations, Thompson went to the apartment that same day. White and Anderson came to the door, Thompson recalled, and eventually agreed to meet with school officials.

“I really feel like we may have saved that kid’s life that day,” Thompson said.

But Anderson and White continued to keep L.J. at home.

In November, a grocery store manager found L.J. in the parking lot begging for quarters and called police, who took L.J. home and later issued a ticket to White and Anderson for violating a city truancy ordinance. L.J. hadn’t been to school the whole year — 70 days.

Anderson said he didn’t know why he was cited, since he was homeschooling. “Apparently, it wasn’t good enough for the school system,” he told reporters.

A few days later, police and child welfare services again visited the home and found welts and bruises on L.J.’s back. L.J. said Anderson had beaten him with a belt as punishment for eating leftover Salisbury steak and potatoes without permission. The boy also told child welfare workers he had not showered for two weeks.

Anderson and White would later tell reporters L.J. was on a diet of fruits and vegetables because he was too fat and prediabetic, but L.J. told police he ate mostly cereal. Though DCFS found credible evidence of both neglect and abuse in its November and December investigations, the couple said they did not abuse L.J. or deny him an education. They are still trying to get the two younger children back, but they say they don’t want L.J. In an April court custody hearing, a judge in their child welfare case admonished them for not accepting responsibility for their treatment of L.J., including keeping him from school.

For its part, the state did ultimately take responsibility for L.J.’s schooling: Caseworkers took the children into custody on a Friday. The following Monday, L.J. returned to public school.

Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed research. Andrew Adams of Capitol News Illinois contributed data reporting. Have a news tip regarding homeschooling, chronic truancy or educational neglect? Email them to Molly Parker or Beth Hundsdorfer at investigations@capitolnewsillinois.com.

For three critical hours after four students were shot, two fatally, at Benito Juarez High School, the school principal and some staffers threw up roadblocks to the police investigation and weeks later had to be threatened with grand jury subpoenas to spur their cooperation, the Illinois Answers Project has learned.

Detectives on the scene of the mass shooting that happened just before Christmas 2022 quickly learned the four victims and the suspected shooter were all current or former CPS students and asked to view school surveillance video, to interview a student witness who’d given information to school officials and sought access to other records relating to the students involved.

But at most every turn, according to public documents and police sources, school principal Juan Carlos Ocon and other administrators told detectives that cooperating would violate CPS policy, and they insisted on checking with their legal department. 

The delays — which have never been previously reported — cost investigators invaluable time to interview witnesses and gather physical evidence, law enforcement sources said. Police arrested a 16-year-old about eight weeks later in connection with the mass shooting after they saw him leaving a stolen car with a rifle. But between the slayings at Juarez and his arrest, he is suspected of taking part in another shooting, authorities said. He has pleaded not guilty in the Juarez shooting, and his defense attorney pointed to the delay in his arrest to question the strength of the case. Illinois Answers is not naming the teen since he was a juvenile at the time of the shooting.

Interviews with Chicago police and CPS sources and a review of thousands of pages of police and school records and emails, many of them heavily redacted, paint a scene of chaos at the site of the Juarez shooting and show how sharp disagreements quickly developed between officers and the school’s award-winning principal, Ocon. 

Police told Ocon and CPS’ chief of safety and security, Jadine Chou, that the emergency of the shooting warranted their cooperation, and the disagreement set off a back-and-forth between high-ranking officials in both agencies that would stretch over months. 

While police discussed having Ocon charged with obstruction of justice, they eventually decided not to, and CPS never disciplined Ocon, records show.

In an interview with Illinois Answers, Chou disputed the duration of the delays in cooperation, as outlined in emails at the time from the CPD’s chief of detectives and investigators on the scene. She argued police eventually got access to the surveillance video and information given to the principal that day by a school employee. 

“It is incomprehensible that anyone would think that we, anyone else, me, anyone around me, would want to do anything to block … would block or delay or forestall progress on an investigation,” Chou said.

A CPS spokeswoman said there’d been no findings of wrongdoing, but records show the agency never conducted a comprehensive after-action review of what happened. 

“It’s because when we sat down to talk about it, it was this: (CPD had) the information, you had the camera, you had access to the camera,” Chou said. “What’s … the after action? You know what, we could both do better on the clarification of the guidelines.” 

Tension between the police and CPS has existed for years over the reporting of violence on school grounds and how and when police can arrest students involved in violent crime. One investigator described CPS as viewing itself as a “non-extraditable Vatican within the city of Chicago.”

But even among police officials accustomed to dealing with CPS during investigations, the degree of resistance they encountered at Juarez stood out, law enforcement sources said.

The dispute spurred CPS to consider changes in how it deals with police when violent crimes happen on school grounds, involving students. And it appears as if cooperation between the two agencies has improved in recent months, through an informal agreement, with police quickly getting access to critical information in two Chicago school shootings. But 17 months after the Juarez slayings, CPS officials have not created any formal policy or update but say they expect to have one finalized before the 2024 school year — about 21 months after the shooting.

At least some of the disagreement stems from an apparent misreading of federal and state law governing the release of student records.

Chou said in the interview that she spoke to CPS counsel from the scene of the shooting. A high-ranking CPS lawyer, Ruchi Verma, recounted in a CPS email that she told Chou: “if there is an active shooter situation … information could be disclosed. No one informed us that there was an active shooter situation.”

But district policy, state law, federal law, and training documents circulated within CPS all allow school officials to cooperate with police during “health and safety” emergencies, and none set the threshold for cooperation as high as active shooter situations. Verma, who is now the district’s general counsel, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A national expert on the applicable federal law said in an interview with Illinois Answers that school officials should have cooperated with police.

“What you just described would clearly be a health safety emergency exception. If there’s a shooter, they don’t have him apprehended, give them whatever they want. I don’t know if they didn’t understand that at the school,” said LeRoy Rooker, who served for 21 years as director of the Department of Education’s Family Policy Compliance Office. “It doesn’t matter what it was — they can give any of that stuff to law enforcement if it’s a health or safety emergency.”

A CPS spokesman said CPS officials on the scene provided information to police on “an ongoing basis.” 

After about three hours, the school’s principal shared information about the former student suspected in the shooting, and police were eventually able to get video from the city’s 911 center. By the time Chicago police started getting at least some information, top brass scheduled a news conference at the district police station nearby.  Police sources described this news conference as an attempt to present a unified front between CPS and the police despite the conflicts.

Much remains unknown about the afternoon of the shooting because CPS, CPD and other city agencies have either denied access to records detailing the investigation or have released only heavily redacted versions. Sources in each agency spoke on the condition they not be identified, citing agency rules forbidding media interviews and fearing retribution.

The Chicago Police Department declined to make any of its officials available for interviews and declined to answer questions about the mass shooting investigation.

Even that night, after some of the disputes were resolved, police had doubts about CPS continuing to provide what they needed. A timeline of the investigation shared among homicide division supervisors shows police still were uncertain whether video existed from a CPS camera near the shooting.

Those doubts proved well founded. Ocon didn’t respond to detectives for weeks after the shooting, and other CPS staff ignored requests for interviews, records show. Frustrated with the pace of cooperation, detectives resorted to running parts of their investigation through the police department’s chief attorney, who sent requests for evidence to her counterpart at CPS.

In early January, a sergeant in the detective division told the department’s top attorney, Dana O’Malley, that some CPS staff continued to ignore detectives and that the principal still hadn’t turned over a school document detectives had been seeking for weeks. At one point, a homicide detective, John Korolis, sent Ocon an email telling him he could get a grand jury subpoena if Ocon didn’t start returning his voicemail messages.

Almost three weeks had passed since the shooting. 

Afternoon of the shooting

At 2:35 p.m. on Dec. 16, 2022, the dismissal bell rang at Benito Juarez Community Academy in Pilsen. Dozens of students and staff lingered in a courtyard outside the school near a pedestrian overpass according to prosecutors at the initial court appearance of the teen charged in the shooting. Informally, it’s near an area known as “the rock.”  

A few minutes after dismissal, a girl was standing with some students lingering outside. She walked over to another group of teens nearby where she ran into a 16-year-old boy who’d been expelled from Juarez for attendance and behavior problems, according to prosecutors. Someone mentioned that there were La Raza gang members in the group she had been standing with.

The girl returned to those teens and warned them that the former student was there “to cause trouble” and that they should leave. 

At 2:38 p.m., the former student asked one of the victims if he was a La Raza gang member and then fired at least eight rounds from a .357 handgun, hitting three boys and a girl described as an “unintended target,” authorities said.

Students scattered. A security guard witnessed the shooting and briefly ran after the gunman while a passing motorist tried to point the guard in the right direction. At least one witness took a photo of the armed teen standing over a victim and then chased the gunman before losing sight of him. 

At 2:40 p.m, police arrived to find the four victims. The two students who died, Nathan Billegas, 14, and Brandon Perez, 15, were both shot in the head, records show. Billegas was a student at Bulls College Prep, and Perez a student at Juarez.

A 15-year-old boy and 15-year-old girl were also shot, and both survived. The girl had a graze wound to her thigh. The boy had a gunshot wound to his shoulder and thigh. The witness — who’d walked between the groups — wasn’t wounded.

Perez died at 3:06 p.m.

At 3:10 p.m., a teacher emailed the principal and other administrators to let them know 25 students and two other staff members were taking shelter in his classroom.

“I know you are all busy right now but just wanted to let you know. The staff and I are doing our best to take care of them,” he wrote.

Billegas died at 3:17 p.m. At 3:27 p.m., police lifted the school’s lockdown.

The moments after shootings are often when they are solved — or not. It’s when memories are fresh and when witnesses are most likely to talk. The longer it takes for detectives to track down witnesses, the more difficult it can be to get them to cooperate. 

Time is critical, too, in gathering evidence for an arrest and prosecution before it can be altered or destroyed: the gun involved in the crime, clothing to compare to security footage, gunshot residue tests, a cell phone.

Detectives expected cooperation because they were investigating a school shooting that resulted in two dead students and two wounded students. It didn’t appear to be an “active shooter,” but police operated under the belief that someone who shoots four people in a school courtyard remains an ongoing threat because they haven’t been arrested.

The police department’s chief of detectives, Brendan Deenihan, outlined difficulties detectives encountered in an email to police department attorneys the next morning. 

While detectives were at the school, they believed a student witness “provided a name of the shooter” to a school staffer. Detectives saw the staffer give a CPS photo of the named shooter to Ocon, according to the email. 

Chou said that after the shooting, the witness and a guardian were in the room where police would have been able to view surveillance footage, and the guardian had told CPS they didn’t want to talk to police.

Chou said no detective ever told her they wanted to speak with the guardian. But law enforcement sources said officers did ask CPS staff to speak to the guardian and were denied access.

Police weren’t allowed inside the room because the guardian and witness were in there, and school officials didn’t want to let the family leave the room because the police were outside, Chou said.

Eighteen hours after the shooting, detectives were still trying to identify the student witness and the CPS staffer who gave the principal the piece of paper with the named shooter’s photo, according to the email sent by Deenihan.

“Efforts are on-going to identify and interview both the student who may [have] witnessed the incident and provided the offender’s name and the faculty member who provided this information to the (principal),” Deenihan wrote.

In the following days, detectives spoke to the witness, who was cooperative. 

As for the paper handed to Ocon, he  “continually refused and resisted in providing this information to the (detectives) citing it was against CPS policy. After several hours the (principal) subsequently forwarded this information to the assigned personnel,” Deenihan wrote.

Chou said a CPS attorney told her not to release the record, because it was from the school’s record keeping system, but said it would be OK to write down the information and share it with detectives, which she did. Chou said detectives left but later returned and said they needed the actual record for evidence.  

And it was only after weeks of back-and-forth and a threatened subpoena before detectives got the document, according to emails. 

Detectives also were unable to get video from the school, Deenihan wrote. 

“Initially the school faculty (principle and CPS Security personnel) refused to provide the assigned personnel any video surveillance of the incident,” Deenihan wrote. 

Deenihan wrote detectives were able to view the video after “three hours” and pulled video from the city’s 911 center that night. Chou said detectives should have just gone to the Office of Emergency Management and Communications in the first place, which is how detectives often pull video from incidents at or near CPS property because they can pull from nearby cameras that aren’t part of the CPS system.

Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, whose 25th Ward encompasses the high school, was at the scene of the shooting early on and said he recalled CPS officials telling him and detectives that CPS couldn’t show them the video because legal counsel advised against it.

His account mirrors that of police sources familiar with the investigation, who said CPS denied officers access to the video. 

Sigcho-Lopez said he didn’t see a sense of urgency from CPS in giving police access to video and information for their investigation. And though he’s one of the most vocal critics of the police on the City Council, he said that “has to be put aside on this.” 

“Look, it’s an emergency, we need to see that video footage, you know. And look I got my own perceptions here,” Sigcho-Lopez said in an interview with Illinois Answers. “Politics aside, at that point to me, that was a priority right? To say, look, we need to solve this immediately.” 

Within about 30 minutes of police beginning to get information, police and district officials announced a news conference at the Near West district police station. Before it started, someone from the police department’s News Affairs office told Supt. David Brown that he might be asked about issues with CPS cooperation. “Yeah, I’ll handle it,” Brown said. Brown didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.

Sure enough, a reporter soon asked about the quality of cooperation from CPS. Brown dismissed the question and did so again after the reporter asked him to clarify.

Reporter 1: Speaking of video we’re hearing from sources that the school has not turned over video. Is there any comment on that or the reasoning why there might be?

Brown: So again speculation and just, just not appropriate. 

Reporter 1: But there is not — you all said POD and private video — there is not the video from the school, correct ?

Brown: So again you talk about your sources, I don’t know who those people are. We’re just starting our investigation so I think it would be irresponsible to, to …

Reporter 1: But to confirm there is …

Brown: No, we’re not confirming your source information. We, what we’re saying is we’re just starting this video gathering, and we’re just starting the investigation any speculation would just be inappropriate.

Reporter 2: These are kids leaving school on a Friday who just got shot, two of them killed. I mean – this should never happen.

Brown: We haven’t confirmed any information about the victims, so it would just be conjecture on your part, or your sources’ part, that the victims are students. As soon as we know that we will share that information. 

Contrary to Brown’s statements, police knew the victims were students and that there was a dispute over access to CPS video.

A Chicago Tribune reporter later asked a CPS spokesperson about “rumors” he had heard of the district’s failure to cooperate. An agency spokeswoman insisted that CPS was “cooperating with CPD, as always.”

By about 10 p.m. the day of the shooting, CPS provided a photo of the former student. Detectives warned other officers that the suspect “should be considered armed and dangerous.”

As it turned out, the boy was well-known to the police; one officer had encountered him at least four times.

Detectives also asked the crime lab to rush its comparison of shell casings recovered from the Juarez shooting with casings from another murder scene earlier in the year since they suspected the same weapon was used in both crimes. 

Amid chaos, CPS braces for new school week

The week following the shooting was chaotic. School officials had to find counselors for students because at least a few dozen of them witnessed or were within earshot of their classmates being murdered, and dozens more knew the victims. 

School officials needed to assure students and their parents that returning to school was safe. Some students didn’t return until after winter break. Others never returned.

One student emailed a student advocate and said they wouldn’t be coming to school because they feared for their safety. Another student emailed a teacher, who removed the student’s name from the email and shared it with Ocon: 

“I got told that one of the kids who got shot was part of a gang and apparently they’re going to show up tomorrow for ‘revenge.’ I’m just saying so that there can be extra security. I don’t know if this is true but either way I wanted to let you know since you’re someone that I can trust. But please, don’t tell anyone that it was me who told you.”

One of the concerns shared by students: social media posts threatened retaliation for the shooting and warned kids not to wear colors of the La Raza street gang that at least one of the four victims was affiliated with. School and police officials soon learned of the threat, and CPS asked for extra officers near the school during the week and adjusted dismissal time.

On the morning after the shooting, a Saturday, Deenihan emailed two CPD attorneys about issues he was having with CPS.

About the same time, he asked detectives to forward what they found about CPS policy and said he’d raise the issue with CPD’s attorneys.  

“I thought you mentioned you reviewed CPS policy (online) which stated there is an exception to sharing information for a Public Safety incident. If any of you have the policy, can you please share? I am going to set up a meeting with the Lawyers next week, and move on this topic ASAP,”  Deenihan wrote. “We will eventually have a school shooting inside a school,” Deenihan wrote. “CPS can’t out a 3 hour delay with sharing information.”

A detective supervisor responded to Deenihan with a summary of state and federal law, and of CPS’ own policies. Deenihan thanked them and said he’d raise the issue with the police department’s lawyers.

“This does help. I will share with Legal Affairs and have them review case law,” Deenihan wrote. “Thanks to all for being professional even when our counterparts may not have done so.” 

On the following Monday, Chicago Police Department General Counsel Dana O’Malley followed up on Deenihan’s concerns, emailing CPS General Counsel Joe Moriarty, to discuss “an issue with CPS and CPD.” 

O’Malley later asked her counterpart at CPS what they tell principals about sharing information with police.

“As we discussed, CPD’s immediate concern is what happens if we have an active shooter and need information on the spot to save lives,” she wrote.  

Moriarty shared the powerpoint presentation that  CPS’ law office provides to principals. It shows the principal and other CPS administrators could have shared information at the scene. 

One slide said: “Federal and state law allow the disclosure of student information in connection with an emergency, to appropriate persons if the knowledge of such information is necessary to protect the health or safety of the student or other persons.” 

An informal resolution

The problems came to a head, and then a resolution, in January.  On Jan. 1, a supervisor in the detective division compiled a list of student and faculty witnesses for the chief CPD attorney and a detective division commander.

“Some staff have also not provided responses to our questions citing a need to contact CPS Legal or have ignored our requests for interview,” the sergeant wrote. “Some of these staff members are witnesses and others have never been interviewed. Additionally, as of this date the principal, Juan Ocon, has not turned over the evidence containing the directory information given to him the day of the incident.”

One day later, Korolis, the lead detective in the case, emailed Ocon threatening him with a subpoena if he didn’t begin to cooperate:

“I have left numerous voice messages for you and have received no response to date,” he wrote. “ With the tragic homicides of these two young Chicago Public Schools students, it’s imperative that we have cooperation from your Juarez High School team. My partner and I need to interview you and your staff at your school post-haste. I have contacted the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office and they are involved with this investigation. If you are more comfortable with a subpoena to appear, let me know.”

On Jan. 5, about three weeks after the shooting, Chou, CPS’ chief of safety and security, emailed Korolis and provided records of student attendance for the date of the shooting and mentioned that she spoke to the principal, who was “able to locate the folded paper you were asking about and he indicated that he made you aware.” 

Chou said in an interview with Illinois Answers that the dispute over interviewing Ocon and other staff didn’t take into account that he and staff were on Christmas break, and that Ocon may have turned off his phone when going out of town. 

“He left the city, he was on time off, and he’s entitled to that. I don’t know when they were calling him. I asked him myself … did you avoid returning phone calls? Did you ignore phone calls? He said he did not ignore phone calls,” Chou said.

“There was a big block of vacation time in between there where, a principal who witnessed this and … and needed time and again … a lot of people took off their work phones and I don’t think that should be held against him.”

Ocon declined to comment. 

More than two weeks after Korolis emailed the principal, subpoenas were issued for three CPS staffers. Detectives met with Ocon and other school officials just after school resumed in January, more than three weeks after the shooting.

As detectives were arranging grand jury testimony for the three CPS staffers, Chou, the school district’s chief of safety and security, pushed an effort to address what happened at Juarez. 

Chou circulated a document described as “draft guidance” that pertained to school-level sharing of information. 

“We would like to provide clear guidance to school leaders on info sharing and other interactions with CPD,” Chou wrote. “Based on feedback from Principals and recent experiences in the field, there is a need to codify and clarify this guidance … due to the urgency, if possible, would ask for your feedback (by tomorrow).”

The document, Chou said, will include examples of what constitutes an emergency and other clarifying information.

As police and school officials were trading input on the policy in February, the 16-year-old suspect in the shooting was arrested at home. Police working in unmarked cars saw the boy run into his home with a rifle and called the department’s SWAT team and told them he was “the possible offender from a homicide.”

He surrendered after the SWAT team’s Bearcat truck arrived, about 3:40 p.m. His family declined to let officers search the home, and a judge signed a warrant about 9:40 p.m., and officers cleared the home and turned it over to a search team about an hour later.

After weeks of working on a fix with input from the Chicago Police Department , progress stopped, except for Chou checking back with Chicago Police into the fall of 2023. It appears police officials never responded to her requests to finish drafting the policy.

Police sources said the two agencies have come to an informal arrangement. Detectives encountered no resistance after shootings at two high schools in late January where students were victims at Senn and Innovations high schools.

Still, 17 months after the shooting, Sigcho-Lopez said it wasn’t appropriate that CPS never conducted any broad internal review of the way its employees responded to the shooting. 

“There has to be an evaluation,” he said.

“What went wrong, internally here? Why [did it take] so long? Why? Because, you know, time is of the essence, right? So,I don’t think that CPS can say, in my opinion, that they did everything they could,” Sigcho-Lopez said.

Every weekday at 7:45 a.m., Michael Craft is notified that a rideshare driver has arrived at his home in Aurora, Colorado. Craft walks outside to confirm the driver’s identity and then helps his foster teenager into the car, sending him off to high school about 15 miles away. 

The platform he uses, HopSkipDrive, notifies him that the ride has started, and soon he’ll receive another that the teenager has been dropped off. On the network’s app, Craft can track a live mapping of the drive. 

“It’s almost overboard but you sit comfortable knowing where your kid is,” Craft said in an interview with the Illinois Answers Project.

He repeats the same process for another foster teen, who attends school in a different district. 

HopSkipDrive is a transportation network company designed to take students ages 6 and older to and from school, extracurricular activities and internships. The company works with 600 school districts, nonprofits and government agencies in 14 states plus Washington, D.C.

The company has helped schools grapple with a national shortage of bus drivers by tapping into a driver network of independent contractors. 

The bus driver shortage is forcing districts to get creative in finding transportation solutions, including Chicago Public Schools, where officials have had early conversations with HopSkipDrive about the feasibility of bringing the service to Illinois and transporting Chicago students, said Kimberly Jones, executive director of student transportation services for CPS, in an interview with Illinois Answers in November. The state currently requires a school bus permit to transport students, even in passenger cars.

“We’re building the foundation right now” with HopSkipDrive and the state, she said. “We’re just beginning to have those conversations.”

Chicago Public Schools started the 2023-24 school year short of roughly 600 bus drivers, about half needed to transport all students. It has forced the district to prioritize students with disabilities and those experiencing homelessness, which totals to more than 11,700 students who either receive transportation or a monthly stipend, a district spokesperson told Illinois Answers. The district has not been able to provide about 5,500 general, magnet and selective enrollment students with transportation this academic year. 

School districts across the country are “all fighting for the same driving population,” Jones said at an October Board of Education about the competition to attract new bus drivers. 

CPS has used alternative transportation since 2004 to help fill in the gaps and contracts with eight companies to transport 1,356 students, district officials said. These companies use a variety of vehicles that may require a Commercial Driver’s License or a state-approved school bus driver permit.

However, HopSkipDrive’s independent contractors, called Care Drivers, aren’t required to have an additional license. They drive their personal vehicles and instead undergo a certification process, background and vehicle checks, and must have five years of care-giving experience. 

While companies like HopSkipDrive do not solve the need for licensed school bus drivers that many districts hope to hire, it has helped to provide supplemental support and relief for districts. 

“We are bringing people from the community – caregivers who are parents, former teachers, nurses, nannies – who don’t want to go through all the requirements to drive a school bus and get their CDL license,” said Joanna McFarland, co-founder and CEO of HopSkipDrive. “Maybe they don’t want a full time job but they are in the community, they are available to help out, and they want flexible ways to make money.” 

“We’re taking people from the community that could never contract directly with a district and providing this network of available drivers who have been highly vetted,” she added.

Craft, whose foster children attend schools in three districts, has been using HopSkipDrive for several years. His work as a foster parent would look different without the help of the ride-share company, he said. 

“I wouldn’t be able to (foster) the kids I have now if there was no HopSkipDrive,” Craft said. “I would have to take kids based on not their needs, but based on where they go to school and that’s not how you should do that.” 

How HopSkipDrive Fills the Gap

School districts can determine which student populations the network serves and how, McFarland said, including for students with individualized education plans and McKinney-Vento students. 

For example, an Indianapolis suburb contracted with the ride-share company last year to take a handful of students experiencing homelessness to and from school. Franklin Township Community School Corporation, a district of nearly 11,000 students, has just enough bus drivers to cover all routes but not to transport students who may be temporarily living several miles outside the district, said Todd Livesay, director of transportation for the district. 

“Without a company like HopSkipDrive, you have to go get the kid very early in the morning before all the other routes start,” he said. So a student might be on the bus for over two hours as other students are picked up, or have to wait several hours at school after the other routes are finished.

HopSkipDrive is “just a godsend because they give (students) a quick ride to and from school. It’s safe,” he said. “… I think about my kids and if my kids were in these situations, would I be comfortable? What would I want them to be doing? And I am comfortable,” he said of HopSkipDrive. 

“It’s better for the student in the long-run.”

The district pays the company a $19 base fee plus $1.99 per mile, or a $58 minimum, whichever comes first, according to its contract with HopSkipDrive.

Denver Public Schools, a district with 207 schools, uses HopSkipDrive to transport about 250 students to and from school everyday. The service is available to general education students, those who are experiencing homelessness and students with disabilities, said Albert Samora, the district’s executive director of transportation. Denver also uses EverDriven, an alternative model that employs drivers, for about 250 students, he said. 

Samora said the district initially used HopSkipDrive and other alternative transportation services for inefficient routes, or routes outside the district for students in foster care or who don’t have permanent housing. But amid the bus driver shortage, the district has turned to these companies for other routes. 

“HopSkipDrive and EverDriven and other contractors have become a side-by-side solution when we don’t have the drivers,” he said. “So now they’ve moved from being a supplemental service to being almost part of our primary service.”

Over the last several years, he said the district has been working to close the gap by, in part, increasing bus driver wages and offering bonuses. Samora said this has helped reduce the shortage from 100 bus drivers in 2019 to roughly 40 this academic year. 

Samora said the alternative services make up about a third of the district’s $30 million transportation budget. For comparison, Chicago Public Schools has a $146 million transportation budget and spends about $7 million on alternative services for companies to transport over 1,000 students, a district spokesperson said. 

Denver has been using HopSkipDrive since 2021, according to its contract, and currently employs 160 bus drivers, said Tyler Maybee, director of operations. A HopSkipDrive ride costs $2.99 per mile plus a $19 base fee for each ride, according to Denver’s contract with the service, obtained through a public records request.

Denver Public Schools, with nearly 90,000 students, and Virginia Fairfax County Public Schools, with nearly 180,000 students, are the largest districts that HopSkipDrive serves, McFarland said. CPS, for comparison, has over 320,000 students in the district.

A Local Option 

While CPS provides CTA Ventra cards for the 5,500 magnet and selective enrollment students and gives a monthly stipend of up to $500 to eligible diverse learners and students in temporary living situations, the rest of students must find transportation on their own. 

Maria Ugarte’s child does not qualify for district transportation, so she or her husband drive her daughter – and three other children in a carpool – 45 minutes one way to Inter-American Elementary Magnet School in Lakeview, she said. 

Ugarte, who serves on the Local School Council, worries that the lack of transportation, especially for low income families, will impact enrollment at her child’s dual-language school. As an immigrant, she said, it’s important for her children to maintain their heritage.

She said she’d be hesitant to use HopSkipDrive because she’s not familiar with how drivers are vetted.

“My daughter is 12. … My kids don’t walk anywhere on their own, so I don’t think I’d be able to put them in a car where I’m not 100% sure that everything has been checked for those drivers,” she said. “… At this moment, I don’t feel comfortable because it’s something so new.”

CPS parent Ismael El-Amin’s eldest two children also didn’t qualify for transportation because they are in selective enrollment schools and live about 8 and 17 miles away. In 2021, he co-founded a carpool service called PiggyBack Network that connects parents by matching routes to school or other activities.  

El-Amin said he founded the company because he understands how the lack of reliable transportation can hinder future opportunities. When he was in junior high school, he had to take a CTA bus to football practice and would arrive late. His coach discovered that El-Amin lived nearby and began taking him to practice.

“That led to being a leader in high school, that led to being recruited to play football in college and just changed the trajectory of my life,” El-Amin said. “I’m sensing how one person’s sacrifice changed my complete trajectory.”

PiggyBack has already partnered with the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago to provide rides for some of its day camps last summer, for example, and operates in a handful of cities including Atlanta, Miami and Boston, he said. CPS has reached out to PiggyBack for information for a potential partnership, both El-Amin and the district said.

“You may not know each other, you may not even go to the same school, you might overlap and go to a school two blocks away, but PiggyBack is going to say, ‘family A, you all should talk to family B’,” El-Amin said. 

There’s a screening process where families meet before carpooling and drivers undergo a background check. 

To pay for rides, parents buy points based on mileage and time. Depending on peak times, families can expect to pay a base fee up to $4, between 32 and 75 cents per mile, or up to $5 per hour. The family that requests the ride pays with points and the drivers gain points when they complete rides. PiggyBack keeps a portion of the sale, he said. 

There is no direct payout for drivers, he said, in order to ensure it’s a true carpool. Instead, drivers can use points to pay for rides for their children. 

Jazmine Dillard, a pediatric dentist, learned about PiggyBack from other parents last summer after she found out that her second-grade son would no longer qualify for busing. She needs help in the mornings dropping off two of her sons and was able to match with El-Amin, who takes a similar route to his daughter’s school. El-Amin said the stop only adds five minutes to his commute. 

After being matched, they quickly discovered that Dillard’s husband and El-Amin both graduated from Whitney Young High School. Although strangers, that sense of familiarity and understanding of values is what sold Dillard to use PiggyBack, she said.

“I’m praying that this works for a long period of time because there are very few (transportation) programs dedicated for children,” Dillard said. “… What made me most comfortable was that (PiggyBack) vets their drivers. I don’t want to just put my kid in an Uber with some random person. … I felt very comfortable and reassured once I heard about how they went about their process of finding drivers.”

Could HopSkipDrive Operate in Chicago?

The main challenge in bringing HopSkipDrive to Chicago starts with the state.

Currently, Illinois Vehicle Code requires drivers who transport students to obtain a school bus permit, even in passenger vehicles, which can carry up to 10 people. To obtain a permit, a driver must pass a written and driving test, health exam, training course, and a criminal background check, among other requirements.

A spokesperson for HopSkipDrive told Illinois Answers that these regulations “don’t make sense” for their CareDrivers.

“In Illinois, the regulations require someone on our platform to follow essentially the same requirements of driving a 12-ton school bus,” according to a statement from the company. “… CareDrivers are driving a few hours a week, driving students just seven to eight trips a week on average, in a traditional sedan vehicle with one to three kids.”

The company supports a bill introduced in the Illinois House last year that would reclassify vehicles that are allowed to transport students and allow the Secretary of State to offer a separate permit for passenger vehicles. State Rep. Jaime Andrade (Democrat, district 40), who introduced HB 3476, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

There is precedent for states to change laws to accommodate HopSkipDrive.

In 2022 in Missouri, for example, legislators changed restrictions to allow vehicles other than school buses to transport students and repealed a requirement that drivers of these vehicles need a school bus driver’s license, among other changes. 

The same year, Colorado’s governor signed legislation that allowed the state’s Public Utilities Commission to regulate HopSkipDrive like other transportation networks. Opponents of the bill, which included competing bus driver companies and advocates for children with disabilities, argued that HopSkipDrive wouldn’t be held to the same safety standards since they are not only overseen by school districts, according to local media reports.

Wherever they operate, the ride-share company is also subject to city requirements for transportation network providers. In Chicago, requirements include having signage about 311 call information and providing up-front pricing to customers.

Given the vastness of Chicago Public Schools, HopSkipDrive may be more financially reasonable and equitable for districts with a smaller student population, said P.S. Sriraj, director of the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois Chicago, in an interview with Illinois Answers.

But if CPS were to partner with the network, he recommended that district leaders test it on a small scale to fully evaluate how it could be used. The district should thoroughly communicate and make decisions with the input from parents, students and teachers, he added.

In the meantime, to attract and retain bus drivers to keep up with increasing transportation requests, CPS has increased wages by $5 over the last two years and is planning 15 hiring fairs, Jones said in October. The district is also trying to optimize routes to make sure they’re efficient, and is working with the Secretary of State to reduce the requirements to be a bus driver. 

“We are looking at all variables when it comes to alternative modes of transportation so we’re not just restricted to the school buses,” Jones told the Illinois Answer Project. 

Companies like HopSkipDrive may be a step in that direction. 

“Private companies in the world of student transportation is not new,” McFarland said.

What has changed, she said, is that students are no longer going to their neighborhood school. 

“There are magnet schools, schools of choice, and a lot more individualized needs. The idea of 70 kids sitting on a school bus route isn’t really reality in a lot of cases,” she said. “And so we need to think about giving districts the tools and the flexibility to solve the problems of this growing and individualized student body in ways that best meet their needs. I think of us as a tool in the district’s toolkit.”

“Reporting on equity issues by the BGA is supported by Joel M. Friedman, president of the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund.”

When Chicago Public Schools first announced a plan in June of last year to build a new $120 million high school on the Near South Side, officials assured residents they would play a key role in the project over the coming months.

But for nearly a year, CPS worked behind closed doors with the Chicago Housing Authority and city departments to negotiate a land-swap deal that would allow the district to build the school – later projected to cost $150 million — on a portion of public housing land, the former Harold Ickes Homes, according to public records obtained by the Illinois Answers Project.

In return for a long-term lease on the public housing land, CPS agreed to buy nearby land for the CHA. CPS bought the land for $10.3 million, even though one appraiser on the deal estimated the land value at just $7.7 million, records show.

These records, which include more than 1,500 pages of land appraisals, real estate agreements and internal emails between officials, offer a closer look at the school’s development process — which some critics say has not been transparent or involved the community in a meaningful way. 

An Illinois Answers review of the documents found that: 

• CPS, the CHA and the city began meeting in the fall of 2020 to consider potential locations for the new Near South Side High School.
• By July 2021, the three entities were intent on pursuing the land-swap  plan — CPS would lease the former Ickes public housing land at 24th and State to build the school  and buy replacement land at 23rd and Wabash for the CHA — despite anticipating community opposition. 
• When CPS received an appraisal report that valued the Wabash land at $7.7 million, district counsel reached out to a second firm to research the first report and provide a new valuation. The second firm valued the land at $10.275 million, then raised the value to $10.32 million.  
• If the land-swap deal did not get necessary approvals, CPS planned to use the Wabash land as a back-up site for the school. But in community meetings CPS maintained that there were no other viable locations for the school, even as community members and elected officials asked the district to rethink its plan to use public housing land. Local activists have argued that the city should complete the construction of promised affordable housing on the Ickes land before building a school.  

The proposal for a new school comes after years of requests for a new open enrollment high school for families in Chinatown and the South Loop. 

The majority of high schoolers in Chinatown currently commute several miles southwest to Kelly High School in Brighton Park, or to selective enrollment schools on the North Side with bilingual programs. And while student enrollment has shrunk district-wide over the last two decades, the South Loop is one of the few neighborhoods in the city where the student population has increased. 

The 1,200-student school would serve students in Chinatown, South Loop, Bronzeville and Bridgeport, CPS has said. 

A previous plan to open a high school in an existing South Loop elementary school ended after families filed a civil rights lawsuit in 2018 — the judge ruled that the plan would violate state laws. 

Discussion of the school arose again in 2020, after State Rep. Theresa Mah (D-24) announced she had helped secure $50 million in state money for the new school.

But since news broke about the land-swap plan, community groups and elected officials — including Mah — have spoken out against the district’s use of public housing land and asked the district to consider other sites. Last fall, Mah said she would block the funds until the district had shown a “good faith” effort to find a new site.

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In March, CPS bought the Wabash land for $10.3 million several days after receiving final approval from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. 

Since closing on the purchase, CPS has not discussed the status of the school, with its future unclear.

“CPS remains fully committed to meaningfully engaging with the community to ensure that a future high school on the Near South Side serves the needs of the growing community,” CPS spokesperson Samantha Hart said in a statement. 

Others remain skeptical of the district’s engagement. 

“Their plan was to move forward with a backroom deal, so of course, they were not going to have a legitimate community engagement process,” said Mah (D-24) after learning of the records obtained by the Illinois Answers Project. The findings "reinforce my belief that there was never any intention or interest about getting meaningful community input on the site selection.”

Mah added that she has not reallocated the $50 million for the school.

Hart emphasized that the district conducted “significant research into potential sites” and extensive community meetings and did not finalize any decision regarding the school until its September 28 board meeting last year.

“Contract negotiations were done in tandem with community engagement sessions to ensure that once input had been finalized and a decision was made, the Board would be able to secure an acceptable site,” Hart wrote. 

Focused early on one site

CPS said it considered 16 sites for the new Near South Side high school. 

A PDF obtained from the district shows it charted the basic size, ownership and zoning information for 16 sites between 15th and 30th streets.

Public records, though, show that CPS, the CHA and the city’s Department of Planning and Development were focused on the Ickes site by July 2021.

At a July 2021 City Hall meeting, CPS showcased the Ickes land and three other nearby properties: a 2 acre parcel owned by Commonwealth Edison at 23rd and Federal, a 6.8 acre parcel at 17th and Canal and a northern portion of The 78 megadevelopment. The Ickes site was “preferred,” according to a slideshow prepared for that meeting. The viability of other sites was not addressed.

With the National Teachers Academy building just a block to the north, building a high school on the Ickes land would create a larger K-to-12 campus with shared athletic fields and facilities, the slideshow noted. But the slideshow also noted serious challenges, like anticipated community opposition to the use of public housing land and the possibility of encountering roadblocks while seeking approval for the land-swap from the CHA and HUD. 

The last challenge that CPS noted was the cost of buying land on the Near South Side to exchange with the CHA.

Despite anticipated challenges, then-mayor Lori Lightfoot and CHA CEO Tracey Scott, gave the land-swap their approval later that month, email records show. 

“We are moving toward a ground lease AND purchasing the two parcels to the east,” a project manager from the mayor’s office wrote to CPS and CHA officials, on July 22.

In the following weeks contract invoices and email records show, the three governmental bodies started moving forward on the project.

Two appraisals, millions of dollars apart

The replacement land, two parcels on Wabash and 23rd, had been on the market since January 2020 for an undisclosed listing price. Previously owned by a transportation company, the land had been used in recent years as parking lots for truck containers.

CPS bought the land earlier this year for $10,318,800 or around $120 per square foot. 

One broker, who declined to be named for professional reasons, said that the final purchase price was high but did not seem excessive in the context of recent nearby land sales. Similar land parcels have sold for anywhere between $51.29 to $408.98 per square foot in the last five years, but the broker said he thought the best recent comparable sales were two properties that sold for around $90 and $50 per square foot, respectively. 

The first appraisal the city's Department of Planning and Development received, in November 2021, put the value of the Wabash land at $6.4 million, or about $75 per square foot. CPS has said it was unaware of this first appraisal.

DPD officials asked the appraiser, Polach Appraisal Group, to revise the report, factoring in other sales from the seller’s broker to get to a “reasonable fair market value,” one email reads. 

In a later email, a DPD official said the appraiser declined to incorporate the broker’s comparable sales because they were not recent enough or useable for other reasons but bumped the land’s valuation up to $7.7 million in a later revision, which DPD shared with CHA and CPS officials in January 2022. 

The next month, an attorney working for CPS called an appraiser from another firm to discuss the first appraisal, legal invoices show. CPS would later hire that firm, Zimmerman Real Estate, to appraise the Wabash and the Ickes parcels.  

In an initial report sent July 1, 2022, Zimmerman’s appraiser said the land was worth $10.275 million. A revised report on Sept. 29, 2022, raised the property’s value to $10.32 million.

On June 22, 2022, CPS abruptly pulled the school proposal from the budget, throwing the school’s future into question. CPS CEO Pedro Martinez told the Sun-Times that the district wanted to pause planning to “answer questions that exist in the community about this proposal and our partnership with CHA.”

Despite CPS pulling the school proposal from its agenda, the CHA board unanimously approved the land swap deal the following month. 

Two months later, CPS reintroduced the school proposal for a vote by the Board of Education, and board members voted 4-3 to approve the land-swap deal.

The $10.32 million appraisal was submitted the following day. That increase was based on updated land surveys that added several hundred square feet to the two parcels’ square footage, and a more recent, higher-cost land sale from April 2022, a review of the appraisals shows.

“The [final] Zimmerman appraisal included more recent, comparable sales data which showed a land value of $200 per square foot,” Hart wrote. “This sale, including the sales in both appraisal reports, support a value of $120 per square foot.”

But an explanation for the difference between the $7.7 million appraisal and the Zimmerman's initial appraisal of $10.275 million — an increase of 33% or about $2.5 million — remains unclear. The $10.275 million appraisal submitted in July did not include the more recent comparable sale.

The two firms used the same appraisal approach and drew from similar comparable land sales. 

Vacant commercial land can be especially difficult to appraise in city centers, experts said. Appraisers must examine recent property sales of similar land and make adjustments to the sale prices of those similar parcels based on location, zoning, size and other factors. 

In an interview, a DPD spokesperson said that it is common for an appraisal to be revised, and for multiple appraisals to be conducted on one parcel of land. Other appraisal experts also said neither practice was uncommon nor raised ethical concerns.

When asked about the conflicting appraisals, Hart, the CPS spokesperson, said that the district was previously unaware of the first, $6.4 million appraisal. But CPS was aware of the $7.7 million appraisal and did not directly address questions regarding why it did not rely on it instead of the much higher appraisal.

CPS said in a statement: "This ($10.3 million) was the appraisal the Board and its representatives used to develop a competitive offer for land situated within blocks of McCormick Place and Wintrust Arena that also had access to existing CPS resources, including a soccer field, track and baseball field, and access to public transit for the growing student population."

“Throughout this process, CPS prioritized the best possible deal for Chicago taxpayers,” Hart said. 

The two appraisers did not respond to requests for comment.

CPS proceeds with land-swap deal, despite community concerns

At an initial community engagement meeting between CHA resident leaders and CHA and CPS officials on May 26, 2022, some residents asked why the school couldn’t be located on the Wabash land instead of the Ickes site.

Records show that CPS had considered building the school on the land in July 2021 and found no immediate problems.  

CPS confirmed to Illinois Answers that the district planned to use the land as a back-up school location if HUD denied the land-swap plan. 

The Wabash land is just under 2 acres. The Ickes parcel set aside to lease to CPS is 1.7 acres.

Choosing another site would have addressed one of the main demands of community leaders, who asked that public housing land not be sold or leased until the CHA has completed the promised replacement units. 

These leaders zeroed in on two sites — 17th and Canal and the north side of The 78 megadevelopment — that had made it to CPS’s final list by July 2021 as alternative locations. 

At several meetings and town halls, though, CPS officials explained the challenges those two sites presented but did not indicate that the district would be reassessing its selection of the Ickes land. 

Hart said that issues have also been identified at the Wabash land. Building a school on the Wabash land, which is divided by a roadway, would “require the construction of a bridge,” Hart said.

As families have demanded more participatory decision-making from local governments in recent years, school districts — CPS and others — have struggled to adapt, said Rachel Weber, professor of urban planning and policy at University of Illinois at Chicago. 

“These are really impactful decisions about where schools are located,” Weber said. “I think the trauma of the school closures really brought home to people how little control they had over these kinds of decisions that had huge effects on their lives.” 

The future of the school remains uncertain, to the frustration of some parents. 

Focus groups with local school councils and community groups have been on pause for several months, according to Kevin Robinson, a CPS parent and LSC chair at Holden Elementary in Bridgeport. 

Robinson said that the planning process has felt alienating for himself and other parents who want to see the school built, but not on public housing land.

“What do the parents want to do? That’s the question that’s never been asked on any of this,” said Robinson. “It’s always, ‘What does the governor and the General Assembly and the state reps want, what does the mayor’s office want, what does CHA want?’”

Robinson also said that the district should increase the school’s capacity from 1,200 to 2,400 or higher to account for nearby developments like The 78, which could add as many as 10,000 residential units within the school’s boundaries. He and other parents felt strongly that CPS should also commit to investing equal amounts in nearby neighborhood high schools. 

“Putting it together and making it happen will absolutely energize and engage the community. But the other side of it is that you have to let the community get involved and take some ownership over that.”

In his mayoral campaign, Brandon Johnson promised to enforce a moratorium on the lease and sale of public housing land, a pledge that was reiterated in his transition team report. 

When asked about the status of the school, CPS spokesperson Hart said that the district is “continuing to work with members of the community and the city to ensure that any future school on the Near South Side meets the needs of this growing and diverse community.”

For Roderick Wilson, a longtime organizer around low-income and public housing and executive director of the Lugenia Burns Hope Center, the frustration around the nature of previous public engagement remains. 

“This is never about what we want, it's about whoever it is running the city, what they want, and how do we either find people or persuade people to agree with us,” Wilson said. “We expect this out of our government, and it shouldn't be that way. Government’s supposed to be there for us.”

On a recent March evening, in the middle of a dimly lit library, DeVonte Arnold is just one of five people attending the local school council meeting at Hirsch High School in Grand Crossing, and the only student. He is paying close attention as a report from his principal delivers some bad news. 

Ten years ago, the school had nearly 400 students. This year, according to the principal’s report, 112 students are enrolled at Hirsch.

Arnold, a 17-year-old sophomore and class president, knows the dwindling enrollment at Hirsch traditionally has meant less money and resources for him and his fellow students. Arnold, ever the optimist, loves his school and wants to do whatever he can to get those numbers up.

“A goal of mine is to at least get 500 more students,” Arnold said in a later interview. 

As Chicago marks the 10 year anniversary of the 49 school closures in 2013, Arnold faces steep odds to reach this goal. Enrollment trends are heading in the opposite direction for many neighborhood schools like Hirsch in part because of decisions by Chicago Public School District  leaders, some of them made before Arnold was even born. 

In the decade since the closures, which left dozens of empty schools throughout the city, CPS has about 81,000 fewer students and has dropped from the third largest district in the nation to the fourth, as the city continues to lose Black residents.

CPS data from the 2022-2023 school year shows 61 school buildings have an occupancy rate of 30% or less, compared to the 17 buildings that fell into the same category when Mayor Rahm Emanuel approved the largest mass school closure in modern American history.

Those stark figures make parents worry about the future of their childrens’ schools and what kind of education they are going to get.

“I feel like the city kids get it the worst,” said Shawanna Turner, whose son attends Crane Medical Prep High School, a school with a dwindling enrollment. “I feel like they’re not taught as much, the schools aren’t as up to par as other schools that are more suburban. I do feel such disappointment that because they’re in the city and in lower income areas, they don’t get the same learning experience.”

Those are the challenges confronting the city’s new mayor, Brandon Johnson, and the Chicago Public School board, about half of whose members will be chosen by voters starting in 2024 as a fully elected 21-member board is phased in. The school system is in similar financial shape as it was a decade ago, with a $628 million deficit projected for the 2025-2026 school year, and a $13 billion deficit in the teacher’s pension system that is less than half funded.

In January 2025, a moratorium on closing Chicago public schools, passed by state lawmakers, will expire, but Johnson showed no appetite for closing more schools in a recent interview with the Illinois Answers Project.

“School closings lead to more school closings,” Johnson said in an interview. “It doesn’t solve whatever its intentions are. If the intentions are to create a better and a stronger education system, then clearly that further substantiates that school closures have been a failure in the city of Chicago.”

CPS CEO Pedro Martinez said this is the first time that he has been part of a district that has closed schools instead of designing solutions to avoid such closures. The 2013 decision created mistrust between parents and the district, he said in an interview with Illinois Answers. 

“’I always have found that the costs of closing a school in terms of trust, the challenges … the disruption we cause with families, those costs, outweigh the benefits that I’ve ever seen from closing the school,” Martinez said.

Public schools closed, charters opened

CPS’ excess of empty schools dates back to decisions made in the mid-1990s, an era that saw a boom in school-age children and a flurry of newly built schools, followed by a sharp decline in the city’s Black population.

From 1995 to 2015, CPS built 230 new schools to accommodate the swell of 28,000 new students that joined the attendance rolls in the first decade of that era, according to University of Illinois-Chicago Professor Rachel Weber, who studied the school closures. 

However, Black residents, who resided in the hyper-segregated and low-income neighborhoods of the West and South sides, began to leave the city.

Beginning in the early 2000s through 2015, more than 180,000 Black residents left Chicago, and CPS lost 64,000 students — 15% of its student body.

“They built a lot of new schools that weren’t necessarily needed so of course they are going to be underutilized,” Weber said. “CPS will always point to these secular trends of declining population, particularly in low-income African American neighborhoods but you create underutilization by creating more schools than you need.”

As the Black population decreased, the city’s Mexican population surged before leveling off — filling in some but not all of the enrollment losses in the district. Enrollment losses are compounded by declining birth rates.

These population trends have left some neighborhoods with schools that have been neglected by the district, despite the increase of charter, magnet and specialized schools. 

Months after closing 49 schools, 11 CPS-operated charter schools opened on the South, West and Northwest sides of the city in 2013, according to district data. 

“I think a lot of the low enrollment has to do with the fact that they have these charter schools now,” said Ida Hudson, the chairperson of the local school council at Marshall High School on the city’s West Side. Her son, Darren, is graduating from Marshall as valedictorian.

Hudson said her mother and sisters attended Marshall and recalled many programs that Marshall used to have but were eliminated due to budget cuts such as nursing, horticulture, ROTC and band. 

Marshall’s enrollment has fallen from 677 students a decade ago to 186 this school year — a 73% decline. Likewise, the school’s budget has shrunk from $11.4 million in 2012 to $4.8 million last year.

“Any time you take away an educational foundation in a neighborhood, that’s really hurtful to a lot of people who have gone through, and that’s their alma mater,” said Pastor Corey Brooks, CEO of Project HOOD – a well-known nonprofit community development organization in Woodlawn. Project HOOD provides youth programming to an alternative school in Chicago. 

Brooks said schools with low enrollment and dwindling offerings for students should be placed on so-called “turnaround plans” to receive extra support from the district.

But if the school does not make progress after a while, “you can’t just keep putting money into something that’s not working,” Brooks said. “Sometimes I think, in our community, we fail to make the tough decisions until things just die.”

Martinez said he recognizes the inequalities between neighborhood and other schools and that his first step in addressing this is adding basic student services — such as ensuring that every school has an arts program.

“You can’t really even start imagining new models, strong supportive systems, if the resources are not first laid out,” Martinez said. 

Inequalities also exist because of the existing physical conditions of school facilities which impact what the schools can offer, Martinez said. 

“At the end of the calendar year, I want to show a comprehensive analysis of all of our buildings and all the needs to really modernize our buildings,” he said. “It’s going to be a big dollar figure, but I think it’s an important conversation for us to have with the community.”

Given the need, he predicts that a 10 year plan will be required. 

“What I want to change is having better, high-quality choices for our children, so that they don’t have to leave their neighborhood. They (should) have the ability to attend strong programming and that the support is there,” he said.

The master facility plan cannot be completed without the input of local communities, Martinez said. He stated that the district’s equity office has been working on how to better engage the community. Over the next six months, CPS will put that plan into practice, he said. 

“It forces my team to be much more thoughtful about how we implement changes, how we communicate them and how we engage our stakeholders. I think it’ll make us better over time, but we have to acknowledge the mistrust that got created,” Martinez said.

New mayor, same problems

Decades in the making, CPS’ financial problems have gone from a campaign talking point during the mayor’s race for Johnson to a reality he and his education team have to grapple with as Johnson has promised a first-class education for all Chicago students. 

Johnson said Martinez knows that “my expectation is for us to move away from the school-based budgeting model and to implement and actively engage in an evidence-based model so that we can receive the additional dollars for resources that come with our embracing of that model.” 

Signed into state law in 2017, the formula creates a funding target based on 34 characteristics of a district including factors such as class sizes and the number of special education students a district serves. Once a funding target is established, the state can then determine what local and state funds need to be awarded.

CPS has already begun to reduce their reliance on student-based budgeting, Martinez said.  

“Less than half of the resources are being driven by student-based budgeting,” Martinez said about the current school year’s budget. “Next year we’re seeing even a further reduction closer to 40%.” 

The district is expected to increase their reliance towards the needs-based model, 3 percentage points, or from 54% to 57%, according to district documents. 

“I feel we’re about a year away from really being able to really fully design and codify what I would call a needs-based model, which is really what the evidence-based formula strategy was,” Martinez said.

To champion such changes, Johnson said he will need to persuade elected officials in Springfield “to come up with progressive revenue ideas that will permit us with the ability to invest in the lives of this generation.”

Johnson said those conversations with lawmakers will be about the importance of having “economically secure” children. 

“Education is a conduit to creating real economic opportunities for our students,” he said. 

During his campaign run, Johnson’s team said student-based budgeting, “contributed to principals whose budgets are strapped to choose between keeping a veteran teacher or having a librarian and a functioning library.”

To ensure equity, Johnson said he has been working with education leaders to create a distribution formula that includes such factors as the economic status and housing insecurity in neighborhoods.

“There will be several measurements that we will use to guide our approach to how we resource neighborhoods and so we won’t be necessarily limited to one particular aspect. They will have a variety of sections that we will review closely to make those determinations,” he said.

Starting next year, the CPS board will begin its transition from seven members appointed by the mayor to 21 members elected by the people. Ten elected members will be sworn in January 2025, but Johnson will appoint 11 board seats. By 2027, the entire board will be elected.

“If there are 21 members, how many votes will it take to approve a school closure?” said Hal Woods, who studies CPS’ declining enrollment at a nonprofit organization called Kids First Chicago. “Now it’s going to take a mayor to make a case to 21 politicians to close a school — even one school. Just think about what that might take.”

Schools on the brink

School utilization rates was one of the central metrics used by then Mayor Emanuel in deciding to close schools in 2013 along with test scores and enrollment. 

Currently, over 300 schools are deemed underutilized by CPS. 

At Hirsch, the 112-student count offered by Principal David Narain at a March 20th local school council meeting does not reflect the number of students who attend class regularly, Narain said. 

About 20 of these students are enrolled “in name only” and may have only attended class for a day or two. 

The school’s occupation rate has declined to just 9%, according to CPS’ calculations. 

Tracking down these students and getting them to attend class regularly is part of what makes neighborhood schools like Hirsch indispensable to their communities, Narain said. 

In one case, a student attended class for just one day back in September, and it took administrators months to reach a family member who said the girl had not been attending due to transportation issues, he recalled. In March, they finally got her enrolled at a new school closer to her home and removed from Hirsch’s attendance rolls. 

This kind of individual attention can benefit kids who might get lost in the shuffle at other schools, Narain said during the local school council meeting. 

He also detailed the downside of low enrollment; the school no longer has a music teacher, and Narain has been trying to hire a new gym teacher for many months now, he said. 

The LSC meeting was sparsely attended, but those who attended came with a deep passion for the school, its students and the broader community.

“The issues [at Hirsch] are not school issues – they’re community issues,” said Maria Owens, a Grand Crossing resident and the vice chairperson of the local school council at Hirsch. Owens  joined the council after her daughter’s fiance was murdered near the school.

Owens dreams of anchoring the high school as a hub for the community by offering informational sessions for parents on things like filing taxes and applying for social services, she said.

Blending community centers with underutilized schools is part of the sustainable community school model, an educational plan that Johnson supports. 

Johnson highlighted the success of Beidler Elementary, a school that was set to close in 2011 but remained open after parent protests and eventually was transformed into a sustainable community school. 

Along with 19 other schools, Beidler received $500,000 to invest in community resources. 

Beidler Principal Ursula Hoskins said the money paid for an extra school counselor, tutoring for all students before and after school, expanded instruction for art such as painting and dance, and six weeks of summer programming.

“Beidler Elementary School is an example of what’s possible in the city of Chicago and that we need to invest in what’s possible in the community and school, and set an example of that,” Johnson said. 

A jarring sight

On the other end of spectrum sits Genevieve Melody Elementary School in West Garfield Park, shuttered as part of the mass closures 10 years ago. It opened in 1965 with the amenities of a modern elementary school: a lunchroom, a gymnasium, a library and a state-of-the-art playground equipped with swings and climbing equipment.

The three-story building is now gutted, its windows smashed, with scavengers having ripped the piping and wiring out of the ceilings and walls.

The sight is jarring for Gail Pullen, who graduated from the school along with her son and owns a greystone home across the street.

Her mother, Leola, worked there as a teacher’s aide after their family bought their West Garfield Park home in 1962. She said they were the third Black family on the block.

The impact of the building’s closure on the community has been “unreal,” she said, adding that people use the site to buy and sell drugs. 

“It’s sad that anybody should have to have that in their neighborhood,” Pullen said. 

CPS sold the Melody building five years ago for $80,000 to affordable housing nonprofit Single Room Housing Assistance Corporation, which runs a 300-unit affordable housing complex in Austin.

Eric Rubenstein, the group’s executive director, said they are seeking financial assistance from the city and state to redevelop the building into a community center with 60 apartments for seniors, which could cost up to $25 million. He said he hopes the project will uplift the community.

“Sometimes, if you get one building built, then somebody spots that and says, ‘Oh, maybe I should invest in this community also,’’’ Rubenstein said. “People who live in these communities want to feel that their area is going to be restabilized and that they can feel safe and secure.”

On May 2, the project won a $150,000 grant through the Chicago Recovery Plan to help cover predevelopment costs. 

Elsewhere in Chicago, the repurposing of the closed CPS buildings varies widely by neighborhood depending on the local real estate market.

Graeme Stewart Elementary School in the gentrifying Uptown neighborhood has been repurposed into luxury apartments. On the western edge of Lakeview, the old Courtenay School building, lined by mature trees and million dollar homes, has become the private German International School, which has an $18,800 annual tuition.

In Tri Taylor, CPS turned over King Elementary School to a developer, who demolished the building and constructed 30 single-family homes on the site, which sell for more than $600,000 each. In exchange, the developer agreed to pay $150,000 to Chicago Public Schools for schools in the ward after all the homes are sold.

More than two dozen school buildings, though, remain vacant or undeveloped, mostly on the South and West sides, despite CPS promises that the schools would be repurposed.

“What you are seeing is the story of Chicago,” said Weber, the UIC professor who studied the school closures. “If you are in a well-endowed property market where there’s a lot of developer interest and that tends to map onto the city’s racial geography, that vacant school is likely to have turned into something that’s no longer a vacant school.”

Looking to the future

At Hirsch, even with its small enrollment, Arnold likely won’t see his school close while he’s there. When the moratorium on closures expires in 2025, Arnold will be a senior. Still, he is passionate about helping a school that has meant so much to him.

When asked about his plans to bring new students to Hirsch, Arnold becomes animated. 

“Oh, I have a lot of ideas about that,” he said, sitting up in his chair suddenly.

Arnold suggested passing out flyers with information about the school and holding community events where student ambassadors like himself could share what they love about Hirsch with prospective students. 

“One of the things that I do want to do as the sophomore class president is to become more involved when it comes to making decisions, especially if it’s decisions that’s going to better the students,” Arnold said. 

Passionate students like Arnold play an integral role in the grassroots coalition building needed to uplift Hirsch and the broader community, Owens said. 

“When you have the youth speaking up about their needs, much like Mr. Arnold does on a regular basis, then it’s hard to ignore,” Owens said. “If people are consistently demanding things, you cannot continue to ignore them.”

He plans to attend a good college and become a lawyer, like his eighth grade math teacher, who was also an attorney and an inspiration to him during his years at Oglesby Elementary School, he said. 

Arnold wants everyone to have the opportunity to build the relationships within their community that have made his high school experience so great, he said. 

“When people look at these kinds of schools, they just look at it from a perspective of, ‘OK, what are we gaining from the school, what is the school doing for us?’” Arnold said. “They think about that, but they don’t think about the relationships that people build there and the overall energy that people can bring to a space.”

Reporting on equity issues by the BGA is supported by Joel M. Friedman, president of the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund.

The number of principals in Chicago Public Schools and across the state resigning from their jobs increased dramatically last year, records show, as the pressures of leading schools intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, causing burnout among educators.

In 2021,103 principals throughout the state resigned, according to State Board of Education data. The following year, that number shot up to 198. Likewise in Chicago Public Schools, the number of resigning principals went from 15 to 27, according to CPS data. The state figures are lower than the actual number of resignations since schools are not required to report that data but do so voluntarily.

While some turnover is normal, the surging number of principals leaving — and the declining number of teachers interested in moving up — worry state education leaders about the disruption it can cause schools and communities. 

The state saw 2.5% of its principals resign in 2018, while that number shot up to 5% in 2022, according to state data.

Many principals say they are leaving their jobs because they lack the support, time and resources to do their work effectively and avoid burnout. Those pressures only increased during the pandemic.

“When people are really hurting they look to somebody in a leadership position to help them, and that puts more pressure and more pain onto you [the principal],” said Seth Lavin, the principal at Brentano Elementary Math and Science Academy on the Northwest Side. In 2022, Lavin wrote an op-ed about the challenges of being a principal that gained local and national attention.

Principals establish the vision that all staff and students try to achieve academically and socially. But for these changes to happen, principals typically need to stay at a school from five to 10 years, said Jason Leahy, executive director of the Illinois Principals Association. 

But current statistics reveal, Illinois schools on average have two principals every six years.

According to state data, from 2016 to 2022, schools such as Algonquin Middle School in northwestern suburban Des Plaines have seen six principals. Three interim principals were hired during the 2019 to 2020 school year due to a principal vacancy, school officials said. 

Midwest Central Primary School in downstate Manito has seen two principals and Carl Sandburg High School in southwest suburban Orland Park has seen three new leaders, school officials said. 

Nationally, the numbers reflect the same realities that Illinois is experiencing. Nearly four out of 10 or 38% of surveyed principals intend on leaving their jobs within the next three years, according to a 2021 report by the National Association of Secondary School Principals. The survey also finds that principals’ job satisfaction dropped from 63% in 2019 to 35% in 2021. 

State Board officials said they are concerned that the number of applicants completing principal programs, a required step in gaining the administrator license, has dropped more than 75% from 2011 to 2020. 

To boost interest and increase retention, Illinois has used Elementary and Secondary School Relief Funds, also known as ESSER funds, to create a mentorship program. A recruitment program has also been created with different state money. 

‘Everything to everybody’

Michelle Thompson, a former Elmhurst elementary principal, oversaw 450 students and worked without an assistant principal for nearly two years before resigning from the job. As a principal and mother of two at the time, Thompson said she “struggled to be everything to everybody.” 

“It’s such an important job (principal) but it’s also such a hard job, and a job that never ends,” she said.

As the person responsible for decisions that influence hundreds to thousands of students, teachers, support staff, parents and overall communities, many principals crave support.

Support can look like many things – from being able to bounce solutions off colleagues, to having a central office and adequate resources to filling teacher and support staff positions quickly. 

Ronn Nozoe, chief executive officer of National Association of Secondary School Principals, says he has been talking to school leaders across the country about their needs. 

“It’s a humongous task, but we keep thinking that ‘Well, the principal and a couple of assistant principals should be able to figure it out.’ These folks run multimillion dollar organizations,” Nozoe said.

Increases in federal funds and principal support need to become a higher priority in not only addressing principals’ concerns but also all educational positions as shortages in teachers and support staff continue, he said.  

“We need to really consider these investments in the workforce in ways that perhaps we haven’t as a country because we’ve not grappled with the magnitude of this kind of shortage all together at once,” Nozoe said.

Teacher retention is directly related to principal retention, Lavin said. 

Teachers can be discouraged from becoming principals when they see what their school leaders go through. What’s more, the teacher shortage already is limiting the supply of potential principals and later potential superintendents. 

“As a principal, I need to be a good person to work for, so I can keep the staff I have in place and hopefully attract other good teachers,” said Craig Beals, a middle school principal at Nuttall Middle School in rural Illinois. 

In Chicago, when vacant positions arise, whether  a school has a succession plan can be critical for its continued success, said Lauren Sartain, a former University of Chicago researcher and now assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

A report she co-authored, published in January, examines the effectiveness and equity of leadership distribution of Chicago Public School principals. 

“There’s pretty consistent evidence that, on average, after a school experiences a leadership transition, you see declines in things like test scores and/or see increases in teacher attrition,” she said. 

“If we use those to proxy both the student and teacher experience, it’s definitely disruptive both to learning and indirectly to learning because you end up having more staff turnover from that year than you would normally at the school.” 

Schools that can plan a smooth transition of school leaders often are those in affluent locations compared to schools with fewer resources.

“The flip side of that coin is that schools that really need consistent strong leadership are the ones that are actually least likely to be able to get that,” she said. “For me that’s kind of the problem; not every school is equally likely to have a smooth leadership transition.”

Searching for candidates

Even before the pandemic, shrinking pools of principal candidates have long been a concern.

Daniel Booth, a district superintendent for Carbondale Community High School, said his district of more than 1,000 students had trouble filling three principal positions. 

“I worked in three principal searches, and applicant pools were very, very low,” Booth said about the searches that occurred in 2018, 2019 and 2020. Booth said two of the former principals returned to teaching while the third moved to a different district. 

Leahy said he also has been hearing from hiring managers across the state that candidate pools have been shrinking the past six years. 

“You only need one, of course, but you sure like it when you can talk to your board and your community about the fact that we picked this one out of this pool of 15, 20, 30 plus people that all were really good,” Leahy said. 

To address early career development, the state has created a mentorship program for new principals, paid for with $1.2 million of ESSER funds. 

Under the program, new principals can pick mentors from anywhere in the state, not just part of their local community. 

Martin McGreal, director of school leadership for the state board, said the program has been instrumental in navigating early career fears. 

“When I mentor people the first thing I say is, ‘it slows down,’” McGreal said about the responsibility of handling multiple tasks as a principal. 

To address a shrinking pipeline, the state has created a recruitment program that allows candidates to get their principal license with financial support.

McGreal said it is important the program recruited diverse candidates that reflect the state’s population. 

Currently, the program has 211 individuals who have completed their first year. McGreal said he also believes that the program will help to create and reinforce positive experiences of being a principal that may motivate teachers to stay longer. 

“Teachers stay longer when the principal or school leaders look like them and they have shared experiences,” he said. 

Of the program’s first cohort, Black candidates make up the majority with 35%, followed by Hispanic candidates at 32% and white candidates at 25%.  

Operating strengths

At Roxana High School, located in the St. Louis metro area on the Illinois side, principal Jason Dandurand, and his assistant principal, Mike Rumsey, have created a partnership to better handle the responsibilities of leading a school. 

“As the high school principal Jason focuses on a lot of things but one of his main focuses is campus life. As an assistant principal, as opposed to the traditional role, I’ve been positioned as focusing on instructional leadership, which is my passion and where I’ve spent the most of my postgraduate research,” Rumsey said.

When they were hired almost a decade ago, Rumsey said the district sought to highlight the strengths of what they enjoy rather than limiting them to the traditional expectations of their titles. 

According to a 2022 NASSP survey, 70% of principals said they spend six or more hours on administrative paperwork but when asked what they want to spend six or more hours on, 72% answered “time with students.” 

“If a teacher has an issue with a student they’ll primarily go to Jason. If the teacher is having an issue with being effective in the classroom or not feeling like they’re being as successful as they want to be, then they normally will initially make contact with me,” Rumsey said. 

Dandurand said he has his fair share of administrative work with conferences, district level meetings and day-to-day operations but within those obligations, he is able to easily “roll up his sleeves” and become accessible to students. 

Rumsey, who was headed into retirement before accepting this position, said the unique opportunity allowed him to stay longer in education. 

“I don’t need to be the principal but I need to be significant,” he said. “I need to be in a position where I know I can operate out of my strengths and make the biggest difference for the sake of our teachers and our kids.” 

Both agreed their partnership is possible because of the support of their superintendent and district. 

“When professionals get to operate out of their primary strength, then there’s less anxiety, there’s less skepticism about motivations,” Rumsey said. 

Reporting on equity issues by the BGA is supported by Joel M. Friedman, president of the Alvin H. Baum Family Fund.

Illinois school districts have received more than $7 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Relief Funds to help address the academic and mental impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. State data showed individual districts received as little as $10,000 and as much as $200 million in funds. The city of Chicago received over $2 billion in ESSER funds — the highest amount granted of all districts.

A Chalkbeat Chicago and Illinois Answers Project investigation revealed that despite student needs, high poverty districts have spent smaller portions of their ESSER funds in comparison to low poverty districts. This has raised questions about the priorities of districts, their pace of spending and what districts are specifically spending their funds on. So far, Illinois has spent nearly $2.8 billion and has until September 2024 to spend remaining allocations.

Click on the map to learn how much districts received and have spent of their ESSER funds.

Note: This data is from September 2022 and may not reflect future changes

This story was produced by the Illinois Answers Project, an investigations and solutions journalism news organization, and Chalkbeat Chicago, a nonprofit education news outlet.

Illinois school districts have received more than $7 billion in federal relief money to help reopen schools and ease the academic and mental health fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

But a Chalkbeat/Better Government Association analysis found that a slew of high-poverty districts across the state have spent small fractions of their relief funds, despite serving students who were especially hard hit by the pandemic. Many are in Chicago’s south suburbs, where almost a dozen districts have reported spending 15% or less of their federal dollars. Bloom Township, where 72% of almost 3,000 students are low-income, has spent only 6% of its $20 million allocation, according to state data.

Statewide, districts have spent about $2.8 billion of the total they received, as a federal fall 2024 deadline is looming.

High-poverty Illinois districts have spent a smaller portion – about 42% – of their Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, or ESSER, allocations than wealthier districts, which have spent roughly 60%, according to the Chalkbeat/BGA analysis of state records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. These high-poverty districts received much more recovery money and have overall spent more per pupil than wealthier ones.

State officials have taken notice of the slow spending in some districts, but are not concerned.

Krish Mohip, the deputy operational education officer for the Illinois State Board of Education, said the state has reached out to some districts that have reported spending little of their allocations or haven’t yet submitted plans for the latest two of three COVID relief packages. But he said his agency is confident that — if districts aren’t spending the money briskly yet — they have solid plans to do so in the next couple of years. Spending is picking up this fall, he noted.

“With ESSER III, we still have a way to go, but we have a lot of time,” Mohip said. “We really don’t have concerns about the rate of spending right now.”

School leaders in the south suburban districts where the funds have been spent more slowly say they have confronted supply chain issues, hiring challenges, and other hurdles. Some said they have spent more briskly than state data suggests, but need to get caught up on reporting expenses.

Yet some education experts are questioning why some districts have been slower to spend their funds — emergency aid intended to help address the heightened academic and social-emotional needs of students. About 30% of Illinois students met reading state standards and about a quarter did in math this year, about 20% fewer students than in 2019, according to state data.

“If there are good ways to spend the money well right now, what are districts waiting for?” said Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. “Kids have been hurt both academically and emotionally. We want to know what they are doing now to make kids whole.”

In Chicago’s south suburbs, spending is slow

Among the districts slowest to spend COVID money are a cluster of about 15 south suburban districts, which serve overwhelmingly low-income Black and Latino student populations. Those districts have spent 14% of their federal dollars on average. That’s about $1,200 per pupil – less than half the average amount for high-poverty districts statewide.

Almost 80% of students in these south suburban districts live in poverty. About 12% of their students met state standards in reading on the 2022 state report card and roughly 7% did in math, showing marked decreases in proficiency compared with pre-pandemic.

Brookwood School District 167, a district that serves 57% low-income students, has reported spending only 7% of its $6 million — or $449,228 — as of mid-September.

Brookwood Superintendent Bethany Lindsay said delays in the supply chain have been a factor, pointing to the delay in getting four vans the district purchased to transport students to field trips and community events.

“It took a year to receive them,” she said. “So we couldn’t claim that until we received them.”

Lindsay said the district has focused on removing obstacles that impact academic, social, and emotional learning for its more than 1,000 pre-K to eighth grade students. For example, the recently purchased vans help remove transportation barriers and expose students to new experiences, she said. In Brookwood, almost 17% of students met state standards in reading, and 6% did in math on the 2022 tests.

“The pandemic really showed that vulnerable populations were going to be most impaired because they have limited access to things already,” said Lindsay.

In addition to the vans, Brookwood has spent its money to adopt a two-to-one technology initiative that guarantees students have devices both at home and at school. The district also added another social worker to each of its four schools and has built two new playgrounds.

Lindsay said the district will share updated spending figures with the state in a quarterly expenditure report due at the end of October – a report required of all districts.

In the coming years, Lindsay said, the district will build a STEM and performing arts center to increase representation in those fields and to give students a place of creative expression.

“People can experience that for 100 years,” she said. “So it really stands for something in the community.”

Other south suburban district officials had varying reasons for the slow pace of spending. Some noted that school building repair projects took awhile to get off the ground; others said they are still figuring out what learning software to buy. One district, Dolton West, is holding on to the bulk of its ESSER money to undertake an uncommon plan to embrace hybrid learning next fall. 

National experts say districts across the country have sometimes been slow to spend the federal money because they have grappled with how to make the best use of such a large windfall.

Many districts worry about having to lay off new hires and cut new programs when the one-time money runs out. Hiring shortages and supply chain issues have crimped some plans to spend the money, and these issues can be tougher for high-poverty districts, said Marguerite Roza of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

West Harvey-Dixmoor, where almost every student is low-income, has reported spending 13% of its federal COVID recovery money as of mid-September, according to state data. The district, where 7% of students met state standards in reading on the 2022 test and 3.5% did in math, earmarked a portion of the latest COVID package to address learning loss as required by the feds.

But the two interim superintendents, who stepped in at the end of 2021, made a plan to spend most of the district’s almost $17 million allocation on building projects.

“Our facilities haven’t actually been updated in close to 20 years,” said interim superintendent Creg Williams.

Williams said it took a while for the district to line up contractors and bring in materials and equipment to ramp up these projects, which include removing asbestos, upgrading ventilation systems and a school cafeteria, and refreshing flooring, doors, and student lockers. He said the district also launched an extended day learning program this school year and hired a dean of students and an instructional coach, and fall reporting to the state will reflect much additional spending.

In Hazel Crest, superintendent Kenneth Spells also said the district has spent more briskly than the 9% of the district’s $8.3 million allocation that state data shows, though he could not provide up-to-date amounts for how much his district has actually spent. In addition to spending on COVID mitigation measures, Spells said, the district has hired additional teachers so it could staff co-educators in some larger classrooms. It also paid existing staff to offer Saturday school for students needing additional academic help.

The district, where 99% of students are low-income, saw reading proficiency dip to about 9% in reading and 3.5% in math during the pandemic.

“We’re seeing some progress,” he said, “but it’s still early in the game.”

“Story is still being written”

The data obtained by Chalkbeat and the BGA shows all federal COVID relief expenditures reported by Illinois’ roughly 850 districts by mid-September, and is broken into five broad categories: capital projects, supplies and materials, employee salaries, benefits, and outside vendor contracts.

High-poverty districts have been more likely to put these federal funds into school facilities while wealthier ones have steered more dollars toward supplies and salaries.

Chicago has been an outlier among high-poverty districts in spending a large portion of its federal COVID relief dollars on salaries and benefits, largely for positions that already existed when the pandemic hit.

But beyond the broad categories, the state data offers little detail on what exactly districts bought with the money. And it doesn’t answer key questions, such as whether salary and benefit spending is for new or existing employees.

Jianan Shi, executive director of the parent advocacy group Raise Your Hand, says parents have generally wanted to see more urgency – and transparency – from districts in spending the federal money.

“We have seen districts small and large fail to be transparent and to include parents in decision-making,” he said.

What Shi consistently hears parents say they want to see: more outreach to reconnect with students and families who disengaged from learning during the pandemic; more staff in schools to support students; after-school programs; mental health support and tutoring.

Spending on facilities allows districts to use the one-time money without setting themselves up for layoffs or program cuts down the road, and some research has suggested a link between better school buildings and student learning.

Still, Shi said, “I don’t remember many parents saying, ‘Let’s just fix this issue in my facility with this money.’ We forget we are talking about students here.”

Mohip, of the state board of education, said his agency monitors the expenditure data districts submit closely, and staff has reached out to some districts to see if they need any help or guidance. He notes districts overwhelmingly met a recent federal deadline to spend the first wave of pandemic recovery money aimed at schools.

Some districts are holding on to the money for good reasons, he said. For instance, a district might have bought computers and other technology early in the pandemic, and might be waiting until closer to the end of the equipment’s life cycle to replace it. Others might still be working to fill new positions.

Ultimately, the money will make a difference, he said. “As of right now, that story is still being written. What we do know is that the money was needed and helpful at a time of distress.”

Other districts have spent COVID money briskly

Generally, the Chalkbeat/BGA analysis found, wealthier districts have spent their smaller funds briskly.

New Trier Township, for instance, has already burned through its $1.2 million allocation. The affluent school district in Chicago’s north suburbs serving nearly 3,850 students used the money for protective equipment, COVID testing, and other reopening expenditures. It also added two instructional assistants focused on math instruction and an academic interventionist.

But some high-poverty districts have also already spent most of the federal dollars.

Laraway, a small district about an hour southwest of downtown Chicago, has spent almost 80% of its $1.8 million allocation.

Superintendent Joe Salmieri said the district put some of the money toward hiring a teaching assistant for each elementary classroom to better target students who need more help.

“It was full-court press — all hands on deck,” said Salmieri. “Time is of the essence to address the negative effects of the pandemic.”

Initially, Salmieri said, the district struggled to recruit candidates, so it increased the pay and was able to fill most of the jobs this past summer.

The district, where almost all 450 students qualify for subsidized lunch, has also updated its math curriculum and ramped up after-school and summer programming. Salmieri said academic recovery is likely a “three-year journey.”

In Pembroke, an elementary district that serves 173 students, including 91% living in poverty, has spent 90% of the $3.4 million it received. Most of the money has been used on upgrading the single school building and tackling the pandemic’s academic damage, said Superintendent Nicole Terrell-Smith.

On the 2022 state tests, about 10% of students scored proficient in reading, and almost 11% did in math. To address this, Terrell-Smith has proposed that all students receive a personalized learning plan to help teachers tailor instruction to their academic needs. Currently, staff are getting professional development to help them to create these plans for the 2023-24 school year.

“I don’t want to have a beautiful facility but students who can’t read,” said Terrell-Smith.

This story was written in partnership with Chalkbeat Chicago reporter Mila Koumpilova.

This article was republished from Chalkbeat Chicago, a nonprofit education news outlet.

Back in May, the superintendent of Dolton West, a high-poverty elementary district in Chicago’s south suburbs, invited a group of educators to learn about “the next generation classroom.”

“I think it’s pretty cool,” superintendent Kevin Nohelty told them. “Way out there.”

In the vision laid out that day by a tech consultant and a sales rep from an interactive board manufacturer, the entire 1,890-student district would embrace hybrid learning. In each classroom, two or more large touch screens would allow the teacher to interact with students tuning in from home or from other classrooms. A camera mounted on the ceiling would track the teacher for those remote students.

Dolton West plans to spend the bulk of its $21 million in federal pandemic recovery money to bring a similar vision – one that melds in-person and remote learning – to the district, Nohelty told Chalkbeat. It’s a highly uncommon step for a district serving elementary students, most of whom are Black and living in poverty.

Nohelty says the hybrid learning plan will roll out next fall and make the district a national trailblazer, “unstoppable” if another pandemic or other major disruption hits.

Officials say the revamp would allow the district to proactively address teacher shortages and to rethink the school day and week, with students attending, say, three days in person and two virtually.

“The classroom would no longer be just the four walls,” Nohelty said. “You can be anywhere in the world and be able to engage with your teachers.”

Over the past year, some experts and student advocates have voiced frustration that few school districts are using pandemic relief dollars as federal education leaders urged: to boldly reimagine learning post-pandemic. Meanwhile, education tech companies are angling to capitalize on the influx of federal money by convincing school districts to double down on the technology that kept them going during COVID school shutdowns.

But for many educators, simultaneously teaching in-person and remote students was among the most challenging aspects of pandemic schooling. And online learning did not work well for many students – especially younger learners and those living in poverty.

Has Dolton hit on a solution to a slew of post-pandemic challenges — or is it setting out to address the academic fallout from the pandemic by giving students more of what contributed to that fallout in the first place?

Some experts question whether the district is giving itself enough time to pilot its plan, secure permission from the state to roll it out, and get input from families and educators.

The district, which serves the neighboring communities of Dolton and Riverdale, has not yet broadly shared its hybrid learning vision with parents and teachers beyond last spring’s focus group. The teachers union president, for one, says she only heard about the plan from a Chalkbeat reporter.

Loree Washington, a Dolton community leader and parent mentor whose son graduated from junior high in the district, said she would be skeptical about shifting any portion of the school day and school week back online without a pressing reason.

“The virtual learning environment was not successful for us — it just didn’t work,” she said. “So if you are offering more of that, what is your plan to ensure success? We know we can’t do the same thing and expect a different result because that would be insanity.”

Dolton looks to create hybrid learning plan

At Washington Elementary in Riverdale, principal Josh Markward says the pandemic pushed the district to become more tech-savvy.

Dolton spent much of the first of three federal COVID relief packages to close the digital gap, getting students computers and hotspots to connect to the internet at home. This school year, across Washington’s classrooms, tablets and headphones share desk space with textbooks.

Veteran educators such as Anita Pennington can be found at an interactive whiteboard, working on rhyming words with a pair of struggling second grade readers while their classmates do a reading comprehension exercise on their Chromebooks.

But the pandemic and the shift to remote learning also tested students in the economically distressed Chicago Southland district, where officials take pride in providing free breakfast, lunch, and dinner to every student, and in focusing on social-emotional learning and restorative justice since long before the pandemic.

Dolton, with a shrinking tax base, only receives about 70% of adequate state funding, by the state education agency’s own math. Washington and other community leaders recently joined a new statewide campaign to advocate for fully funding schools.

Citing COVID fears among families and teachers, the district remained virtual for the entire 2020-21 school year, making it a national outlier.

“Academically, (the pandemic) was tough,” Markward said. “Everyone took a big hit. Everyone was trying to figure it out, teaching on a computer screen.”

On the state’s 2022 standardized tests, 4% of Dolton students met Illinois standards in math, and 9% did in reading, both down slightly compared with before COVID. Chronic absenteeism jumped by more than 20 percentage points, to 53% of students.

After returning to full-time in-person instruction last fall, the district set out to address the damage. In a federal COVID relief spending plan submitted to the state, it said it would beef up its after-school programs and hire additional staff to help with students’ recovery, among other measures.

Then, officials shifted gears. Nohelty said he wanted to save the remaining roughly $20 million for a bolder, more comprehensive plan to rethink learning.

Nohelty says he was deeply shaken after watching the pandemic upend learning in his district — and feels it’s crucial that districts prepare for the next disruption now.

“I don’t want to go through that again and put learning on the backburner,” he said. Thanks to his hybrid plan, “We would be unstoppable — and I say that with passion.”

The hybrid model would give students who are sick, traveling, or missing a ride to school a chance to remain connected to the classroom, he said. That could be a game-changer for students with disabilities that make regular attendance challenging.

And, Nohelty says, the district would be prepared for staffing shortages, allowing educators to teach students in more than one classroom — perhaps with an aide or substitute supervising the students logging on from other classrooms.

“It’s what I would consider very cutting-edge,” Nohelty said of the district’s hybrid plan. “I do believe we are going to change the way we do learning in Southland.”

When Frank Brandolino of Joliet-based Velocita Technology came to meet with the educator focus group last May, he explained that his company has been developing a hybrid “solution” along with Nohelty and Dolton’s deputy superintendent, Sonya Whitaker. Besides the technology, the plan would also include extensive professional development, he said.

The interactive board rep demonstrated software that teachers can use on their boards that allows students to take quizzes, share photos, and “huddle” to collaborate virtually with each other. As many as 60 students can log on at one time, the sales rep noted. Teachers, meanwhile, can track whether students are actively engaging with the platform.

The portal, accessible from anywhere in the world, is the company’s “COVID child,” the rep said. Brandolino then showed a short video featuring a college History 101 class, in which four in-person and 16 virtual students collaborate on an assignment about ancient civilizations and then share their work with the class.

Teachers peppered the group with questions, some voicing enthusiasm for the portal’s features.

Experts raise questions about Dolton’s plan

Bree Dusseault, of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, says that it’s refreshing to see a district thinking about how the federal relief dollars can help reimagine learning. Overwhelmingly, districts have used the money to buttress a status quo whose inequities and limitations the pandemic underscored.

In surveys, high school students have said they want schools to look different after the pandemic, and some have voiced interest in the flexibility hybrid learning can offer, including for students juggling school with work, internships, or college-credit classes.

But, says Dusseault, remote learning was hard for younger learners. Given the planned fall of 2023 districtwide launch, a number of questions remain, Dusseault says:

Does Dolton have time to pilot this model on a small scale, then gradually roll it out based on data on student outcomes it collects along the way? How will officials reconcile the plan with state instructional time requirements and employee contract obligations? How will the district sustain the ongoing costs of the plan, including refreshing technology, once the federal money runs out?

Most importantly, how will the district ensure that students learning remotely part-time remain engaged in learning? Do all students even have a quiet, safe place to learn virtually?

Those were issues in Dolton during remote learning, when several teachers told Chalkbeat that some students joined in from noisy settings while others eventually stopped logging on.

“This district might be looking to implement a plan that’s not fully baked,” Dusseault said. “Innovation for innovation’s sake is not what we’re looking for.”

Both Dusseault and Bart Epstein, an expert at the University of Virginia and head of the nonprofit EdTech Evidence Exchange, are not aware of other districts adopting indefinite hybrid learning. There are good reasons for that, says Epstein: Expecting young students to stay home two days a week would be a hardship for parents and a challenge for teachers having to juggle both in-person and virtual learners.

“Having hybrid learning as an option for some students to use occasionally is a great idea,” he said. “I am not aware of anybody making the argument that permanent, forced hybrid learning is a net win for students.”

Dusseault stresses district officials need to be communicating about their plan with teachers and families and gathering feedback. Now.

Darlene McMillan, the head of the district’s teachers union, said she was reluctant to comment on the plan until the district spells it out publicly. She said staff vacancies are indeed an issue in Dolton. But the idea of teaching multiple classrooms using hybrid technology concerns her, and might be at odds with the district’s educator contract, she said.

Technology has powered learning in Dolton

On a recent Thursday afternoon, second grade teacher Richard Kealey stood in front of an interactive board in his classroom in Dolton’s Lincoln Elementary. He was teaching addition to the nine students in attendance that day.

A boy – dressed in the district’s uniform of white polo shirts and navy pants – had answered that 5 plus 4 equals 9. Kealey scribbled that answer onto the board with his finger and asked his students if it was correct.

“Don’t be shy, class,” he said. “Speak up!”

The students responded with a chorus of yeses. Then they put away their workbooks under their desks, donned headphones, and fired up their tablets. Kealey walked the room checking on students as they logged on to a math program called i-Ready, which offers a series of math games that grow easier or harder depending on how well users do — a program Kealey and Lincoln principal Byron Stingily credit with faster-than-projected growth in math.

Kealey estimates his students missed out on half a year of learning during the virtual stretch. A year after they returned to campus, there is still academic and social-emotional catching-up to do.

“It has been great to have students back in person,” he said. “Remote is really challenging on kids.”

During student pickup at Lincoln later that afternoon, some parents and students echoed that refrain: Technology: good. Virtual learning: hard.

Seventh grader Ja’Shawn McGee said bouncing back from remote learning has been tough. He is still trying to get back on track, especially in math and science.

“It was hard, trying to learn on a laptop,” he said. “I like being in front of a teacher.”

Eternity Lee said her son, Elijah, is also playing catch-up.

“He hated e-learning,” she said. “He missed his friends. He fell behind academically.”

She said she wants to see the district spend its federal COVID relief dollars on after-school programs and more one-on-one help with reading for her son, echoing the original spending plan the district had submitted to the state.

Nohelty says the model he envisions won’t simply reprise the virtual learning seen during the early days of the pandemic, but rather draw on its lessons to make technology work better for students going forward.

He acknowledged the district is going into uncharted territory. He is considering a site visit to high schools in California that have adopted hybrid learning. The district still must ask the state to waive some seat time requirements, step up public engagement about the plan, and work out the details of a pilot later this school year. He hopes to bring the plan to his school board in December and seek proposals from vendors next year.

Washington, the Dolton community leader who has served as a parent mentor in elementary classrooms for years, says educators need more help to catch students up academically, from tutoring to more after-school programs.

“If we’re talking about emergency funding, tell me what you’ll do to address the damage now,” she said. “What are we doing about student achievement?”

Mila Koumpilova is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat Chicago.