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To help sell their plans for a district shakeup, CPS leaders have touted a variety of school improvements. But paying for those improvements will mean taking the district deeper into debt at a time when the district is already facing substantial debt service obligations.

As he walked along the path from one West Side school building that is slated for closure to one that will stay open, Congressman Bobby Rush ducked into an abandoned building with its windows and doors gaping open.

Congressman Danny Davis remarked, “I bet you there are people living in there.”

“It is easy for sex offenders to snatch kids up and drag them into the building,” said Shakeena Sturgen, who has an eight-year-old and seven-year-old at Delano in West Garfield Park.

Most of the corners along 16th Street, in the heart of the West Side neighborhood of North Lawndale, are vacant lots. On snowy winter days, no one clears the sidewalks in front of the lots, forcing pedestrians to trudge down the middle of the street.

Here and there, a run-down building still stands—some house little neighborhood stores, others are boarded up and tagged with graffiti. Only two new buildings exist: a fire station and an apartment building on the site where Martin Luther King Jr. once lived in 1966 during his stint in Chicago to protest the city’s segregated housing.