Jesse Ruiz was appointed Vice President of the Chicago School Board when Mayor Emanuel took office. Two years and one teachers' strike later, his Board is facing a budget shortfall of nearly a billion dollars, stubbornly intransigent academic improvement, and about a hundred-thousand unused seats in the schools -almost a 20% surplus.
Is he concerned that there was such a wide-spread public perception that he and his board-mates were installed for the purpose of turning over a maximum number of schools to private charter operators?
Sarah Karp, Catalyst-Chicago's ace reporter, also joins the panel. She asks Ruiz about the new schools-closings commission that CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett has created to deal with the incredibly complex issue of closings – before declaring a five-year moratorium on any further shut-downs. She says it doesn't seem clear whether the commission is just going to recommend a general direction or devise a specific list of schools to be put out of business.
Acknowledging the difficulty of closing and/or consolidating schools, he says it simply has to be done. There are schools built for hundreds of students with barely a hundred in them, and few prospects for enrollment increases any time soon. And it's worse in the most economically stressed neighborhoods.
Further complicating matters is that, in addition to the 300-or-so "underutilized" schools, there are also more than 80 that are overcrowded.
Still, he acknowledges, there isn't much use for a 70-year old school in a struggling neighborhood, especially if it needs a million-dollar boiler replacement. So many of them will simply have to be demolished.
Sarah asks about the Gates Foundation, which has announced that it will not be funding CPS at this time because, it says, of the recent staff changes at the top. However, CPS has been invited to reapply in a few months.
We ask about the billion dollar deficit. Sarah Karp points out that most of it is pensions, and that any solutions will come from Springfield. So isn't the pension piece unfairly inflating the "we have a billion dollar shortfall" argument?
"So, yes, largely due to the pension issue, but those are our obligations until maybe there's some reform in Springfield that lessens that burden, and federal support that has helped us in past years and this year they're gone…without going to the taxpayers every year to seek more revenue, we've gotta be able to run the system with what we've got", he says.
And a parting question. Was Ruiz shocked to see the near unanimity of the CTU, and the strong support from parents? (and their ability to supersede the 75% support level demanded by new State legislation).
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