19^th Ward Public School Mater Plan

The 19^th Ward Public School Mater Plan was proposed on July 21, 2016. The affected schools were notified on September 6, 2016.

Excerpt from Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s private email account from the Freedom of Information Act request brought on by the Better Government Association.

Fight Against the plan to close and merge local public schools

The data presented in this report uses ESRI data for the communities within each specific boundary for each of the 5 of the schools that would be impacted.
Zip code data is not used and the actual boundaries used for each school’s data is show in maps of their specific boundaries shown at the end of this presentation.
The data on the next two slides, shows that all of these school areas have healthy population levels when all ages are included. The total population in 2000 of the5-school areas was 47,374. In 2021 it is projected to be higher at 50,736.
Of the five school areas: Sutherland, Mt. Greenwood, Kellogg, Cassell, and Clissold, three are expected to have more population in 2021 than they had in the 2000 census: Sutherland, Kellogg, and Clissold. Only Mt. Greenwood and Cassell are expected to have a lower population in 2021 than in 2000 – and that difference population is real but very significant.

Economic Consequences

The elimination of Kellogg as a neighborhood school will have almost certainly have negative economic consequences on housing values in North Beverly.
The link between quality neighborhood schools and housing property values has long been established. This is especially true in the areas served by Kellogg and Sutherland where many of the homes are large and designed for family households – too large for the majority of today’s US households – over 65% of which are one and two person households.
Adding the Kellogg population to Sutherland’s at that campus will result in overcrowding at Sutherland (which also has a preponderance of family-sized housing). The result: more than tripling the area impacted by negative housing values caused by a closure of Kellogg.
The next table shows that the value of the approximately 17,887 housing units in the five school areas has an estimated total housing value of $5.4 Billion.
42% of that value is for the housing within just two schools: the Kellogg and Sutherland school boundaries.
The Sutherland boundaries include fewer houses (4,132) than either Mt. Greenwood (5,200) or Clissold (4,377) but account for $1.5 billion or 28% of the housing value of the 5-school area. Mt. Greenwood is 26% and Clissold 22%.
As noted, much of the Kellogg and Sutherland housing value is in higher value family-sized houses that will bear a greater brunt of the many proposed and recently passed property tax hikes by the city.
Placing that enormous share of the property values (42% of the total for all 5 schools) at risk by consolidating their combined neighborhood schools into one overcrowded campus may save in CPS operating cost but the savings will be quickly lost within just a few years by lower tax collections (for all taxing entities including the County). This, as a result, of damaged and diminished property values for the 42% of the 5-school area housing values.
The family sized houses will take the biggest hit as they may be unsalable.
The total school-aged population in each set of boundaries is free to go to schools other than the local CPS one. In the 5-school area, that means Catholic and other private schools too. It can also mean test-into elementary schools and charter schools that ring the ward.
More than 2,500 children in the 19^th Ward attend the 8 local Catholic schools in the 19^th Ward – easily rivaling the attendance of the five local CPS in this analysis serving the same areas.
This is a tremendous cost saving to CPS as the parents of these children contribute property taxes to support CPS and could use it but choose not to.
Private schools can have positive educational and economic impacts, but the tuition paid comes from a family’s disposable income. At least 20% of this category of income is spent at local restaurants and retailers.
Under the proposed plan, as many as 200 students will shift to private schools potentially taking $250,000 out of the local business economy – hitting restaurants and retail the most as well as the governments that collect sales taxes.
It is inevitable that this process will result in a movement to the Catholic schools that will last at least as long as the economy stays stable. Since Catholic schools typically do not address diverse learning populations as well as the public schools, the result will be that the percentage of diverse learners in the remaining public schools – already as much as 20% at some schools – will rise.