Since then, preschools have struggled to create native-language programs. 

Now, preschools that receive state funding are bracing for another challenge: new state rules that will require staff who teach English learners to have bilingual certification. The rule doesn’t kick in until next year, in July 2014, but schools and districts are already looking for ways to recruit staff given the perennial shortage of bilingual educators.

The state currently has 1,525 teachers who have both a bilingual or English as a Second Language endorsement as well as a preschool teaching certificate. On paper, that is enough teachers to meet the need, says Illinois State Board of Education spokeswoman Mary Fergus.

But some of these teachers are not in the active teaching force at all, while others may be teaching in the early grades (an early childhood endorsement covers up to 3^rd grade). Others are not teaching in areas where they may be most needed.

“The distribution of [English learners] is not always in line with where the teachers are,” Fergus notes.  

A 2012 study by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute of Human Development documents the geographic mismatch: In Illinois ZIP codes where at least 20 percent of the population is Latino, the study found just one preschool teacher certified to teach bilingual or ESL classes for every 50 preschool-aged English learners.

Relying on recruiting, creativity

Martin Torres, senior policy analyst at the Latino Policy Forum, points out that some districts are ready to meet the challenge, but others are not. “There is a dearth of those [bilingual] professionals entering the pipeline,” he says.

Torres praised the state’s move to provide scholarships for teachers to earn the needed endorsements with federal Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge funds, as well as a CPS program to provide training for a cohort of 100 teachers. Plus, some districts are using state bilingual education money for teacher scholarships, Torres adds.

Chicago Public Schools says it won’t know how many teachers might be needed until the fall. A spokeswoman says the district “aggressively campaigned” last fall to get more teachers to start certification programs and over 100 teachers enrolled at City Colleges, National-Louis University and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“Based on the trend of schools in need, we feel the cohort program will meet the required needs,” according to the spokeswoman.  Teachers who finish the coursework should be certified by spring 2014, just before the deadline.

CPS says it will also begin training principals in July on the bilingual pre-K requirements and monitor school to ensure compliance.

At Bateman Elementary, Principal Pat Baccellieri is searching for teachers and hopes to recruit future hires from Loyola University, which will soon require all of its graduates to be endorsed in bilingual or English as a Second Language education. In the coming year, Bateman will have Loyola student teachers “working side by side” with Bateman teachers, Baccellieri says.

In the meantime, the school relies on creativity to ensure students get native-language instruction.

Classes include a mix of English-speakers and Spanish-speakers, but students change classes for part of the day so that Spanish-speakers can get bilingual instruction even if their teacher doesn’t speak Spanish.

For the future, the school is considering a dual-language model in which all students would learn in both Spanish and English.

“I just think it’s a better way to go,” Baccellieri says. “It’s actually supporting the development of both languages.”  Typical bilingual programs aim to boost content knowledge in a student’s home language but ultimately transition them to learning solely in English.

But Baccellieri notes challenges that loom down the line, given cuts in state aid.

“With increasing need, increasing demand and increasing policies, support is reduced, and it doesn’t make sense,” he says.

At Casa Central, Deputy Director of Children and Youth Services Amanda McMillen says the school works hard at “making sure we have Spanish-speaking staff within the classroom.”

Books, too, are in both English and Spanish. But much of the instruction is still in English, with support to Spanish-speaking students as needed.

McMillen says one new staff member has the required certification and two more are working toward it. She hopes that all four of Casa Central’s preschool classes will eventually have certified staff. She’s also interested in a dual language program but notes that “there hasn’t been too much direct guidance [from CPS] at this point.”

Creating a pipeline

One goal of bilingual education in the early grades is to make sure young children are exposed to rich, high-level language so they become literate in their native language.

The state requires bilingual teachers to pass a test on the foreign language they will be teaching in. But some observers worry that the standard isn’t high enough and that newly certified preschool teachers – many of whom aren’t native Spanish-speakers – won’t be able to teach children with enough fluency and high-level vocabulary to promote children’s growing literacy.

Sandra Warner, principal of the Early Learning Center in West Chicago District 33, explains the dilemma. “We’ve either found native speakers who don’t have the early childhood certification, or we’ve found teachers who have a Type 04 [early childhood certificate] who speak some Spanish but aren’t native speakers,” Warner says.

To work around this problem, the district has created its own pipeline of former teacher assistants--native Spanish-speakers who have earned their early childhood certificate. “We set up a road map for them,” Warner says.

Elgin District U-46, which runs a dual-language program that is 80 percent Spanish in preschool and kindergarten, has found bilingual teachers partly by recruiting them from Spain. But that’s a short-term solution, since the teachers’ visas are temporary. Three teachers will leave at the end of the current school year.

In the long run, Elgin U-46 is working with area universities – top staff members have quarterly meetings with representatives from Northern Illinois University, Eastern Illinois University, Illinois State University and Judson University – to drive home its needs.

“The biggest key has been for us to communicate with our university partners that we need bilingual preschool teachers that have their ELL [endorsement],” says Julie Kallenbach, Director of Early Learner Initiatives for the district.

Sharon Giless, director of English Language Learners at Waukegan Public School District 60, says her district has provided tutoring to help several existing teachers pass the state Spanish skills test. Once they pass the test, they can teach bilingual classes temporarily while they take courses for an endorsement.

Before the district began bilingual preschool classes, Giless notes, students learned a little English but received much of their instruction from Spanish-speaking aides. But even with bilingual classes and more English instruction, children’s language test scores at the end of preschool showed that they needed a kindergarten class almost entirely in Spanish. 

“The idea of bilingual support from the teacher assistant is good, but the delivery of instruction really comes from the teachers,” Giless says. “There is something lost in translation. Having preschool in English  doesn’t make them English speakers.”

During a recent visit, a parent educator had Smith carry out an activity with her son that involved putting items in a container, then having him pull them out and examine them. The goal: to promote learning by capitalizing on a young child’s natural inquisitiveness.

The parent educator also checked Jeremiah’s development and screened for hearing problems and other potential concerns. If red flags are raised, Smith will get a referral to an agency for help.

Smith’s deep involvement in the program led her to become a home visiting recruiter, through POWER-PAC, the acronym for Parents Organized to Win, Educate and Renew – Policy Action Council. POWER-PAC is sponsored by the nonprofit Community Organizing and Family Issues, known as COFI.

“I get to sign up other moms who may not be as attentive to children as I am, who may not have access to books, who may not have car seats,” says Smith, who lives in Englewood. “It makes them better parents as well.”

Smith has guided other parents through the program, like a mother whose 2-year-old rarely spoke. “By 2 years old, they should be saying full sentences,” Smith points out. “[The mother] had never done anything about it. When she was introduced to the home visiting program, they let her know that he should see a speech therapist.”  The boy’s vocabulary has since increased.

Another plus has been social support. “I get to bond with other moms and dads, and we get to share stories about our children,” Smith says. “I am more aware of what [my son] can do and how advanced he is, and also what to look for in the next few months.”

The goal of home visiting programs (some if which work with expectant mothers as well as new moms) is to ensure that the youngest children get on track for a healthy start in preschool and are eventually ready for kindergarten. Studies have found that home visiting programs can improve children’s odds of graduating from high school and not having to repeat a grade, as well as their health and social skills. Economics researcher and Nobel Prize winner James Heckman has found that birth-to-3 programs have even greater economic returns than preschool.

New federal grants for home visiting, authorized as part of health care reform legislation, began flowing to Illinois in 2011. In Chicago’s Englewood, West Englewood and Greater Grand Crossing neighborhoods, these dollars have increased both the reach and potential impact of home visiting initiatives by opening up more spots for families and amping up community outreach for screening and placement.  

Plus, through a new partnership called the South Side Early Learning Network, more inter-agency collaboration is starting to take place. The collaboration’s goal is provide help for home visiting families that, through screening, are identified as being at-risk for domestic violence, mental health problems and other issues.

Chicago is just one of six places in the state that are doing similar work. The others are Elgin, Rockford, Cicero, Macon County, and Vermilion County.

Statistics bear out the need for extra services. Screening tools have found that 16 percent of women who are screened for home visiting services may be victims of domestic violence, and 23 percent may be suffering from depression, according to data from a state presentation on the program that took place earlier this year.

The collaboration relies on coordinated intake, in which institutions in the same neighborhood now send families to a single agency--Children’s Home + Aid Society—for screening to determine if they qualify to participate and which agency is the best fit. Previously, agencies screened families themselves.

The federal grant funds will also pay for research on the effectiveness of home visiting, including a national overview; an evaluation of doulas, professionals who provide support with pregnancy issues and childbirth, then conduct home visits once a baby is born; and a study of the Fussy Baby Network, which provides support for parents whose infants won’t stop crying. The results will be presented to Congress sometime in 2015.

Expectations are high. Illinois has promised the federal government it will show progress in improving maternal and infant health; decreasing child abuse, child injury and emergency visit rates; and decreasing the incidence of domestic violence.

Building a network, overcoming barriers

The South Side Early Learning Network, convened by COFI, promotes the collaboration and help agencies work through any problems that arise.“Our role is to bring the various partners together and help them shape an agenda for how they want to move forward on early learning goals for the area,” says Tracy Crowder, senior organizer at COFI.

So far, the network has had four meetings and has drawn 80 different participants, including CPS, area preschools and schools, the city’s Department of Family and Support Services, and advocacy groups such as the Ounce of Prevention Fund and Illinois Action for Children.

Rosazlia Grillier says she thinks some of COFI’s work – including its report “Why Isn’t Johnny in Preschool?” – was a catalyst for the work now being done by the South Side Early Learning Network’s work. Grillier is a trainer and community organizer at COFI.

Among other findings, the report found that families weren’t participating in early childhood education because of a confusing system and “a lack of coordinated services.” The single referral system makes it easier for families. “You’re not telling 500 people your same story and still not getting the services you need,” Grillier says.

Despite the benefits, some parents are reluctant to participate in home visiting. Smith says they may fear that strangers coming into their home will be nosy.

“I tell parents, the program is not that personal.  They don’t come in looking in your house, looking through cabinets and things like that,” Smith says. Families might also think the home visitor won’t understand their concerns. “They think, ‘It’s just a job, so how could this person possibly know what I need?’ ” Smith adds.

Other hurdles exist, such as unpredictable work schedules, families who have lost their housing and need to move, or animosity from partners or roommates toward the home visitor.

To bring people in the door, POWER-PAC and other agencies have sent recruiters out to knock on doors in the neighborhood and give families information about the program, says Grillier. Screenings are also done at hospitals, food stamp application centers, or even at high schools to reach teen parents.

Workers also visit health clinics, homeless shelters, child care centers and preschool programs, all in an effort to talk to parents about what the program does. Even community organizations are referring families to the program.

“By all working together, we almost create a dragnet,” says Jan Stepto-Millett, vice president of early childhood services at Children’s Home + Aid Society of Illinois.

The ultimate goal is for word-of-mouth to become the major marketing tool, says Liz Heneks, vice president of programs for ChildServ.  “We are looking at how do we create avenues for clients to bring in their friends and talk about the program?”

Through the collaboration, agencies also can refer clients to each other’s programs. For instance, Children’s Home + Aid Society’s fatherhood program now includes fathers whose children are in other agencies’ home visiting programs.

“I think it allows us to provide more useful salient services to the families, and provide it in a way that encourages us to partner rather than compete,” Stepto-Millett says. “In this age where there are all kinds of fiscal pressures, it is really important to be careful about getting everything we can out of each dollar. By doing this, we reduce duplicative services.”

Stepto-Millett says the extra outreach means families are coming in that “weren’t even on the radar” before.

Coketha Hendricks of Henry Booth House says the connections among agencies have strengthened services, and that she is now able to access resources that “you wouldn’t have even thought about a 0-to-3 program connecting with.”

“I have got contacts with people in the schools, programs that deal with ex-offenders, DCFS-involved families,” she says.

 “The reason he’s giving you is that the library is too small. How can you prove that? What is some fact about the library that will show it’s too small?” she prompts the class.

 “Some people think it’s too small,” one boy says.

But this is not the answer Butler-Wilson is looking for. She pushes the students to give facts to prove their point.  A girl suggests one, saying, “More people keep coming in [the library] and there’s not enough room.”

Learning how to construct written arguments, the goal of this lesson, is an important element of the new Common Core State Standards, set to begin phasing in next year. Last year, Dumas was one of 35 schools that became “early adopters” of the standards and were given money to pay for substitutes while teachers worked on model lesson plans aligned to the standards. The lesson plans became the basis for curriculum guides.

(Dumas and two other early adopter schools, Canter and Armstrong, are closing. The Dumas building in Woodlawn will stay open as children from nearby Wadsworth transfer over and the school is renamed Wadsworth.)

As CPS begins to phase in the standards, one group of teachers will have a particularly tough task. Teachers of young children will have to expose students to high-level ideas without relying on strategies that are not geared toward young children; for example, too much desk work that could easily frustrate them and, in turn, make learning more difficult.

In fact, many early childhood teachers have long resisted efforts to impose academic expectations on young children. The Common Core standards have re-ignited the debate, and the fear that tasks meant for older students will be “pushed down” to younger children.

But educators say that, with careful work, teachers can learn to adapt. At Dumas and other early adopter schools, preschool and primary teachers are striking a delicate balance, slowly incorporating lessons that teach Common Core concepts and skills to young children at a level and pace that are developmentally appropriate.

Principals also say young students can handle the Common Core, if teachers give them the right support.

When very young students respond to a topic by talking about their likes and dislikes, Dumas Principal Macquline King says, teachers refer them back to the text they have read. “We understand what you like, but what does it say in the text?” she explains.

Nancy Hanks, the principal at Melody Elementary, says that a lesson in which students look for details in a text can be made accessible to those who don’t write yet: Some students may write the details, some may draw them, and others may dictate them to the teacher, she explained at a Chicago Principals and Administrators Association panel.

“In raising the bar, [students] jump right up to it,” Hanks believes.

Hanks once saw students drawing pictures of dolphins after reading a book about dolphins, but realized that the pictures didn’t have specific details in them. So she told them to re-do the pictures. Some of the details the new pictures showed included dolphins’ spouts and dolphins coming up for air.

Rhonda Atkins, a preschool teacher at Dumas, says that meeting with kindergarten teachers and learning about the standards helped her align lessons with the expectations her students will face when they leave preschool.

Teaching students about counting money entailed getting a book about money that was appropriate for preschoolers, Atkins explains. “You talk about something preschoolers understand--has anybody ever gotten money for [their] birthday or for Christmas? Did you get coins? Did you get dollars?”

She also asked parents to count loose change with their children to reinforce the concept at home.

Other concepts Atkins introduces include shapes, ordinal numbers (first, second, third and so on) and writing.

“Children have been working on how to write sentences. My very high-level students are able to write paragraphs,” she says. “There’s only a few, but you try to push them further.”

Breaking down complex texts

Cardenas Elementary Principal Jeremy Feiwell says that having students read more complex material has paid off with higher test scores on the NWEA MAP assessment, which measures the ability to understand complex texts and is given to children as young as 3^rd grade. The ability has “skyrocketed” among Cardenas students, Feiwell says.

Referring to evidence from the text is an important part of the Common Core, and Feiwell says even children as young as 1^st grade can do it. Proof hangs on the wall of Maricela Aguirre’s 1^st-grade classroom, where a collection of student work shows answers to questions about a story featuring animals, with evidence to back up students’ thoughts. “How did the pig outsmart the wolf? How do you know?” reads one prompt.

In a pre-K classroom, teacher Maria Morin reads the story “Thinking One Can,” an earlier version of the story that became the classic children’s book “The Little Engine That Could.”

But this story is read aloud from a teacher’s guide, with only one picture.  Morin tells her students it will be more challenging to listen to the story without looking at pictures to tell what is going on.

At the end, Morin asks students what lesson the story is trying to teach. After some discussion, she re-reads the sentence where the story sums up its moral.

Feiwell explains that Morin’s teaching shows two shifts spurred by the Common Core. First, Morin is showing students how to summarize main ideas using evidence from the text. Second, by exposing children to a story without pictures, she is helping them get ready to understand higher-level books down the road.

In Elizabeth Rickey’s 3^rd grade class, students work through a play about the Greek mythological character Medusa, who was transformed into a monster when a goddess turned her hair into snakes.

“We were doing a shared reading of a play about Medusa, and we were looking at it through her perspective,” Rickey explains. She asked students taking on Medusa’s role to answer questions like “What do you think about the way Athena treated you?” and “Why do you think she changed your hair into snakes?”

“It’s a really challenging thing to put themselves in the character’s shoes,” Rickey says.  At the same time, they are talking about how to differentiate their own point of view from that of the author.

From basic arithmetic to understanding concepts

In 2^nd-grade teacher Eva Verta’s room at Columbia Explorers Elementary, students practice counting, using math worksheets with pictures of manipulatives.

“Remember, I should be able to follow how you’re counting by checking your labels,” Verta reminds the students. She speaks directly to one boy: “You know what, Emilio? I cannot read your mind when I look at these labels. I can’t see how you counted. I look at yours and I say, ‘Hmm, how did you get 501?’”

With the Common Core, math must go beyond just getting the right answer. Students must be able to explain their thinking and demonstrate understanding—in this case, by labeling each item in the drawings.

Columbia Explorers is not an early adopter school, but has been incorporating the English standards for a couple years. This year, the school began to implement the math standards.

Principal Jose Barrera says that based on the school’s experience, redesigning lessons will be hard work.

“Nothing’s going to happen with CPS giving you this magic kit,” he says. “You have to take ownership, 1,000 percent.”

In 3^rd-grade teacher Jennifer Ford’s room, some students practice multiplication tables on worksheets. Other children, working in groups, say them out loud using flashcards.

Before long, Ford gathers the whole class in a circle. Picking one number at a time, she has students surround her for an exercise. The first number she gives out is five.

One by one, each student in the circle reels off a math fact of his or her choosing that involves five:

“Five times one is five.”

“Six times five is 30.”

“You got it,” Ford says.

“Five times six is 30.”

“Five times ten is 50.”

Curriculum coordinator Beth West explains that one Common Core goal is to make sure students master skills “fluently” so they can use them with ease. In the earlier grades, this includes a sizable dose of mental math.

Terry Carter, who is leading Common Core implementation at the Academy for Urban School Leadership, says schools run by AUSL are focusing mostly on math in grades pre-K to 3. AUSL manages 25 schools and is slated to take on six more with this year’s school actions.

The schools are working with the Erikson Institute’s Early Mathematics Education Project on ways to make math concepts accessible and appropriate for youngsters.

As part of the Common Core, Carter says, students must be able to explain and demonstrate their thinking using manipulatives and visual models.

Children should also learn to persevere in solving tough math problems.

“The Common Core likes to see the endurance and stamina of children to be inquiry-based. Children are allowed to struggle with a problem rather than being told or funneled [to an answer with] teachers breaking down every step,” Carter says.

To learn how to make those changes, AUSL teachers are working in groups to practice lessons.

One teacher teaches a lesson in another teacher’s classroom while colleagues observe. Then, they analyze what went well and what went poorly, and teach a revised version of the lesson to a different class.

Not necessarily a disconnect

Sandra Alberti, director of state and district partnerships and professional development for the nonprofit Student Achievement Partners, is hopeful about what the Common Core could mean for early childhood teachers.

“What the standards do is signal to early childhood educators and everyone in the system that… these are a list of things kids need time to develop, play with, and explore,” Alberti says.

In math, Alberti says, giving students more time with the material can slow down instruction and allow time for deeper conceptual understanding.

Currently, most math teachers teach strategies and tricks students can use to get the right answer.  “That’s not math,” she says.  Some curricula focus on concepts but fall short at having students actually practice enough problems. But, Alberti says, “We shouldn’t make a choice between having kids get the answer right and having them explain their thinking.” 

With reading, she says, the most important piece of the standards is to challenge students to engage with material above their level because that’s how they will grow as readers.

“It’s very hard for (students) to catch up to grade-level peers when everything we give them has been scaffolded,” Alberti says. “If they’re not given a more complex text, they’re not going to develop a more complex understanding.”

At Dumas, Butler-Wilson says that the Common Core can be a good fit for early childhood because the standards ask students to use their imagination and ideas. 

Students can master the standards, she believes, “but it requires everyone to change the way they think about teaching and learning. It requires the teacher to be more of a facilitator in the classroom as opposed to being at the front [teaching] one lesson the same way to all the students. The standards can’t be reached that way.”

Butler-Wilson recalls a math lesson that required students to do a scavenger hunt for items of a certain length –a foot, an inch or a yard – and made posters of the results. The goal was to help strengthen their understanding of the concept.

“When they would think about an inch, they would think about the things they discovered in the classroom,” she says.

Elizabeth Najera, principal of Velma Thomas Early Childhood Center, also doesn’t necessarily see a mismatch between Common Core expectations and what students should be learning in preschool.

A team of teacher leaders in the school has identified what they want children to know in order to be ready for kindergarten. One thing that’s key, she says, is making sure teachers intentionally design instruction to build on children’s knowledge.

Teachers at Velma Thomas try to use open-ended questions to develop higher-level thinking skills, even in very young students, and Najera sees that as a good fit. 

“Some of the things that are in the Common Core, I think they are not too different from what we are doing already,” she says.  But a lot will depend on how the district changes its expectations for preschool teachers, she adds. “I guess we kind of have to wait on that.”

Early Childhood Resource Page: http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/early-childhood

Common Core Resource Page: http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/common-core

But the district is proposing 11 co-locations, eight of which involve charters moving into buildings with traditional neighborhood schools. The proposals have reignited fears among some activists, parents and even school staff--not only about the logistics of space-sharing but that the co-locations are just a back-door way of kicking out a traditional school.

There’s precedent for their anxiety: Co-locations in CPS have not worked out smoothly and have been marked by tenuous relationships between students and staff. In some cases, charter schools have taken over.

Still, concern about co-locations is not just about sharing buildings with charter schools. Teachers and parents at Marshall Middle School are also alarmed at the prospect of sharing a building with Disney Magnet 2 High School.

Beginning of the end?

Two high schools also appear to be in a particularly precarious position: Bowen and Corliss.

Both schools are in similar straits—located in tough South Side neighborhoods, struggling to lower dropout rates and raise test scores. Both have the building capacity for about 1,000 students but have enrollment of only around 500.

CPS proposes to have both Bowen and Corliss share buildings with Noble Street charter schools. Noble Street charters have an average of 50 percent of students meeting or exceeding standards on the Prairie State exam, compared to a district average of 32 percent. And though students do not take entrance exams for charters, Noble Street expects students to attend an orientation to pick up an application in order to be part of the admissions lottery (a step that critics say makes the charters selective, in comparison to neighborhood schools).

Noble Street leaders have not completely signed on to the co-locations yet and are still looking at the option, said Angela Montagna, the charter operator’s director of external affairs. A CPS official said charter schools could turn down the offered space, but won’t be offered alternative.

Chris Goins, slated to be principal of the Noble Street at Corliss, said he is recruiting students from the Pullman neighborhood and engaging the community to sell them on the school.  

Corliss Principal Leonard Harris said he doesn’t see Noble Street as a threat, but rather as offering more opportunity to students in the area. “I am not fearful,” he said. “Corliss is a good school.”

However, three teachers from Corliss showed up at a public hearing in April to voice their concerns.

Eva Dervin said she and other teachers want to know if the co-location is a precursor to a phase-out.  “If so, we should be told that at the beginning instead of being told two years down the line,” she said.

Mandy Walker-Edwards added that students who don’t meet the expectations of Noble Street will land at Corliss.

“Now, instead of us getting selective enrollment status like Noble Street, we will still be a [neighborhood] school,” she said. “We have to take whatever student at whatever academic status. It is like you are pitting one school against the other. One gets selective enrollment and you tell the other, take whatever [student] is out there.” 

“Nothing to help our students”

At Corliss, the principal is putting a positive spin on the co-location. But at Bowen, Principal Jennifer Kirmes talks about her trepidation at the prospect and her dismay at not being consulted before the plans were drawn up.  

The exterior of Bowen’s main building is a gracious, red brick. But inside, it’s age show. Some ceiling tiles are missing and paint is crumbling. The school will get some repairs because of the co-location, though CPS proposes to put Noble Street in an annex. Noble Street receives a lot of private donations and usually does a complete renovation before moving in, and Kirmes wonders how this will make her students feel.

Kirmes is also upset she was never consulted before the plans were drawn up. She recently won funding, through the city’s Ready to Learn program, to open a preschool in a part of the annex that once housed one. “It has little toilets and little sinks, so it doesn’t need a major renovation, just a little elbow grease,” Kirmes says.  

She plans to offer Bowen students the option of career education courses in early childhood, giving them the chance to do an internship at the preschool. The early childhood program will go forward, but Kirmes doesn’t have the money to renovate another space and doesn’t know where she will put the preschool if the annex is occupied.

Kirmes also points out a safety concern. Noble Street schools do not, as a practice, have metal detectors. The charter’s students will have to use a gym in the main building, and Kirmes says security staff are worried about students being in the main building without having been screened.

“I want to be cooperative and collaborative, but I also want us to survive,” Kirmes says.

Bowen recently experienced a dramatic shift in 2011, when it was consolidated back into one school after being split up into four small schools. Teacher Magen Kilcoyne points out that the current crop of juniors started freshman year at a small school, went to a consolidated school their sophomore year, got a new principal their junior year and now will face having a “completely remapped building.”

“It does absolutely nothing to help our students in terms of much needed resources and the overall quality of their education,” Kilcoyne says. “It does, however, tell them that they are not a priority and are very much dispensable to those at the top. What picture does this paint, when another fully functioning, [highly] resourced school takes up their space? It seems quite clear that this is just the first step in slowly destroying this public school.”

A third high school that will co-locate with a charter is Hope, which will share its building with a new KIPP middle school. Several Englewood residents attended public hearings to say they wanted KIPP to come to their neighborhood and no Hope representative came to oppose it.

Ironically, however, Hope used to have middle grades, with a 6^th through 12^th grade configuration. At that time, Hope was the highest-scoring school, at those grade levels, in the area.

When Englewood High School was closed to make way for Urban Prep and Team Englewood, Hope was turned into a receiving school for high school students and was stripped of its middle grades. Since then, its test scores have plummeted.

Not just concern about charters

Charter takeover remain the biggest concern among some activists and parents, in particular those at Wadsworth Elementary in Woodlawn.  CPS is proposing that the University of Chicago Charter High School-Woodlawn take over the Wadsworth building that both schools have shared for several years. The charter will take in 60 more students.

“Do you think it is fair for Wadsworth school to relocate to another building just because the University of Chicago wants to expand their charter school?” said Wadsworth LSC chair Pamela Jernigan, sparking applause at a public meeting in April. “CPS, if you really want to make a strong impact and impress us all, then put a moratorium on all charter school actions. They are only options and not solutions to the public school fiasco.”

Later, Jernigan said the experience of building-sharing has not been good. For one, it has provided a sharp contrast between a school that has a wealth of resources and one that does not.

From the day it opened in 2006, the charter school had a lab of brand new Apple computers. Students also had laptops. But up until last year, Wadsworth had a room of outdated computers, Jernigan said. “It sends the wrong message to children.”

Jernigan also doesn’t like the fact that Wadsworth’s students are being sent a few blocks west to Dumas, into an area along 67^th Street that is considered more dangerous. “If it weren’t for the charter school, Dumas would likely be coming here,” she said.

But Shayne Evans, director of the University of Chicago Charter Schools, insists that the charter school didn’t request and doesn’t need the rest of the building, even with the additional students.  He also notes that he and the school’s staff have not assessed the rest of the building, nor have they inquired about how much it would cost the charter in facilities rent paid to CPS.

Though specific plans have not been developed, Evans says it might be better to build a new high school, rather than try to make an old elementary school work.

Yet Evans says he would like the school to enroll more students. As one of the few charters with an attendance boundary, the school got about 700 applications this year for a class of 160 students.

“We have a huge demand and we are trying our best to serve it,” Evans says.

One sheet informed her that Emmet Elementary School, the school her son and daughter attended since preschool, was closing next year.  According to the paperwork, students from Emmet would go to either DePriest or Ellington. (For a complete list of closing and receiving schools, see our chart to the right.)

On top of this news, their folders contained an application and a two-page list of all the schools to which she could apply. This led Jamison to conclude that her children, now in 5th and 6th grade, and their classmates would be not be guaranteed a seat anywhere. She said principals would be allowed to pick and choose which students they wanted to take in and the decision would be based on test scores.

“Why should I have to apply?” said Jamison, who serves on Emmet’s local school council.

A day after CPS announced plans for the largest school shakeup in history, parents were trying to figure out where their children would attend school next year, as many vowed to fight the actions. CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett is recommending that 53 elementary schools and one small high school close. The Board of Education is set to vote on the measures at its May 22 meeting.

In actuality, Jamison doesn’t have to apply unless she wants to enroll her children somewhere other than the designated receiving schools, said CPS spokeswoman Robyn Ziegler. Ziegler said the application was handed out because CPS extended the deadline for open enrollment and magnet cluster schools, in an effort to give parents choice. However, sought-after spaces in high-performing magnet, selective enrollment and most charter schools are already filled.

The situation was made more difficult by the complicated scenarios designed by CPS officials as they attempted to get all displaced students into what they consider to be better facilities and better school programs.

Students at 16 of the schools that are closing will stay in the same building, which will be taken over by the principal, staff and students of higher-achieving schools. In five separate situations, students will be assigned to one of two or three schools. CPS did not say how it will assign students when there’s more than one welcoming school.

In addition, 18 of the schools have special education cluster programs, which serve more severely disabled students from the area. These students might not go to the designated welcoming school, but rather be assigned to different places.

As parents and activists digested this information, they continued to return to what has been a common concern as the announcement of mass school closings approached. Jamison joined a group of West Side activists at a press conference where speakers accused district leaders of targeting black students and putting them in danger.

Jamison said that students from DePriest and Ellington already get into fights with those from Emmet. “They come to the school and jump over fences and fight,” she said.

Michelle Hunt-Harris held a poster that showed the gang boundaries in Austin and where the schools that were recommended from closure are located in relation to their welcoming school.

Hunt-Harris, who serves on the local school council at May, said she is in a “state of unease” as she worries about the children crossing gang boundaries.

“Our community is being disrespected,” she said. 

See a timeline of school closings under Mayor Rahm Emanuel: 

With the program set to expand to three more schools with funding from Target, classrooms were on display. One visitor, Stephen Zrike Jr., chief of schools for the Pilsen-Little Village Elementary Network, noted the impact of the initiative. He called the amount of reading and writing being done by Cardenas students “unlike anything I’ve ever seen.” The Children’s Literacy Initiative, supported by research showing that teacher coaching and collaboration can improve instruction, aims to expose teachers to best practices in early literacy and build a community of teachers who are working to strengthen their teaching. The goal: to help young children learn to read during their earliest years in school--a key time for building literacy, especially if children come from low-income homes (as do 87 percent of CPS students).  Poor readers from poor families face among the worst educational outcomes, and high-quality literacy instruction is also important to build on the gains children make in preschool and ensure that they don’t “fade out.”

CLI’s promising results in Philadelphia, where participating schools made greater gains than other schools, helped it win a U.S. Department of Education Investing in Innovation “validation” grant. It

The federal funding will end in 2014-15, but CLI has a plan for sustaining its presence in Philadelphia with a $1 million grant there, and is eyeing Chicago for a similar expansion as soon as fall 2013. The program has applied for another grant from Target Corp. in hopes of making it happen.

CLI hopes to reach five more schools with its “model classroom” program in the next two years. Under its long-term expansion plan, instead of just model classrooms, entire schools will become “model schools” that disseminate literacy best practices among others in the area, serving as “hubs of knowledge.” Teachers and principals from model schools will mentor those from nearby schools – in some cases, even including charter schools and private schools.

A lesser amount of training and coaching would be offered to surrounding schools, with the model school serving as a lab to help teachers learn.

But Jen Weikert, CLI’s director of external relations, says that “a key part of this growth plan is getting the district to buy in.”

Once CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett gets past the current school closings issue and takes a closer look at curriculum and instruction, Weikert says CLI hopes that early learning and early literacy become a priority and the Byrd-Bennett commits to working with the program over the long term.

“We don’t want to be in a position where year to year, we are working with the district,” she says. “We want to be in a position where we are partners working toward shared goals.”

A key goal of CLI’s expansion is to train a larger number of teachers in key skills for teaching reading by getting different organizations that work on early literacy, including teacher training programs, to focus on the same key skills.

“We need more general practitioners who are well versed in early literacy,” says Weikert.

In a pilot program, the organization offered training in teaching phonics and phonemic awareness to 50 student teachers in Philadelphia, plus instruction on how to keep “running records,” a snapshot of a student’s reading ability at a specific point in time.

Growth and challenges

With the help of the Target Corp. grant, eight CPS elementary schools participating in the federally funded project were joined in spring 2012 by three more schools – Manierre, Brenneman, and Armour.  In fall 2012, two more schools, Manuel Perez Elementary and John Walsh Elementary, joined with funding from the Chicago Tribune Charities and others.

The Target-funded schools made progress: 66 percent of 3^rd-grade students at the Target-funded schools met state standards on the ISAT reading assessment, compared to 57 percent of students in a comparison group of schools.

But before winter, staff had to navigate a change in CPS leadership--and the challenges of implementing a large-scale program in an unstable environment began to surface.

Some schools suffered from high turnover among teachers and other staff. Manierre and Brennemann landed on the list of schools that CPS could potentially close.

At Manierre Elementary, the principal left and a number of teachers did, as well. At Brennemann, between 55 and 75 students left because the school switched to a year-round, Track E calendar and the model classroom teacher left – forcing the program to start over with another one. [Even so, Brennemann posted an increase in scores.] Another model teacher had to change grades.

 “We can bring teachers that have changed roles up to par with their peers,” Weikert notes. Principals also receive coaching, which can help bring a new principal up to speed.

What about teachers who leave a school? “Wherever those teachers land, the children are benefiting from the best practices they have gained with CLI,” Weikert asserts.

Adding resources, focusing on instruction

In teacher Margaret McIlvain’s room at Manierre, newly outfitted with a rug for literacy instruction and extra books so that children can decide what to read, coach Vanessa Villanueva leads a Message Time Plus lesson, where students work together to dissect a “message” written on the board from the teacher or from a reading.

Villanueva later explains that in McIlvain’s room, the furniture will soon change to feature tables with book bags on the back, rather than desks. “It’s more about having the kids use their whole classroom, so they’re not confined to their desks,” she says. 

Weikert says it’s not just about having furniture that is more appropriate for young students, but about training teachers in how to use it.

“So much of the first dose of coaching has to do with classroom culture. It is the basics of how do you run your classroom – how do you get the most out of your students, and how they get the most out of you?” she says.

The program is also helping McIlvain and other teachers hone in on how to help students learn to sound out words in the context of sentences and books.  “Teachers in low-income schools need the skills to teach phonics – and they need to teach it faster and better than others, because their kids are coming in with such deficits,” Weikert says.

 “I realized there are some words in this book that are difficult for a 3^rd-grader,” McIlvain says. She has students clap and chant the spelling of the words “them,” “their” and “would.”

“Today we are going to talk about how to stretch out a word and write it,” the coach says.

“To show your d…”

“Dog,” a student says.

“That’s good, I hear predicting!” she says

As she writes the words, she starts by saying sounds and lets the children prompt which letter she should write.

“B-oh-sss-sss,” she says as students guess the letters. When a girl shouts out a second “s,” the coach asks her why. She points out that it’s at the end of a word and has an “sss” sound.

“That’s a rule you have learned over the years,” the coach explains.

When she is done, the class reads the message together: “To show your dog who’s boss, hold him by the muzzle. Dogs need a serene environment, so pet him so he can feel relaxed.”

“I want you to put your thumb up every time we come to a word we stretched out or spelled together,” Villanueva says.

When the group has finished reading, she asks for student volunteers. “Point to a word that you know, that you could maybe teach kids something about,” she says. Daquera picks “relaxed.”

“What’s the first sound in ‘relaxed’?” she asks. “R”, Daquera says, naming the letter, but the coach prompts her to give the sound--“rrrr.”

Next, she quizzes the girl on whether “relaxed” is something that is happening now or that already happened. And she asks the class to think of other things that they did in the past, pointing out that the ending “-ed” usually means something already took place.

Another student chooses to help teach the class about the word “serene.” Coach Villanueva says that because of the long “e” in the middle of the word, there needs to be a silent “e” on the end.

As each student gets up in front of the group, they are praised with a cheer for how well they are doing.

After more lessons in spelling patterns and sounds, the coach guides the class through the steps on a poster titled “How to Spell a New Word.”

She points out they can stretch it out to hear each sound, write each sound, check if it looks right, compare the sounds in the word to a word they already know, and look around the room at the word walls for help.

Villanueva explains that guessing the spelling will help their teacher understand their writing better, and that it’s fine to try and spell a word themselves instead of asking the teacher how to do it.

At the end of the lesson, Villanueva explains that she is also helping McIlvain learn how to create a classroom with more positive behavior expectations, where students collaborate and support each other.

In a post-conference, she asks McIlvain if she thinks students feel confident with the material. “They do,” McIlvain says, but notes that attention is still a problem. She suggests putting students who are not focused on the lesson in the front.

Next, Villanueva points out that when she spelled the word “enough” as “enuf,” students were upset because they knew it was wrong – allowing them to make the connection that the letters “gh” can make the same “fff” sound as “F.”

The other 3^rd -grade teacher in the school, Jemil Haywood, also received coaching through CLI – 30 hours, versus McIlvain’s 75. (Haywood has since moved to teaching 2^nd grade).

On another day, McIlvain wraps up an Intentional Read Aloud – story time, but carefully planned so that it expands students’ understanding of literature – by having students compare and contrast the book “The Rough-Faced Girl” with a more traditional version of the Cinderella story.

Finishing up a third year

At the end of this school year, CLI will have given coaching, training and resources to kindergarten through 3^rd grade teachers at all eight Investing in Innovation-funded schools, Weikert says.   “Through Investing in Innovation, we will be able to have the research and gold seal of approval behind us. This is just the beginning of what we are going to be able to do in Chicago.”

The Investing in Innovation program began by working with 3^rd-grade teachers, then added kindergarten and 1^st-grade teachers in the second year, followed by 2^nd-grade teachers. Each teacher will receive three years of coaching. After that, hands-on coaching will end and the project will aim to build on teachers’ sense of self-sufficiency through “model classroom meetings” with other teachers in the program.

During one such meeting in fall 2012, seven teachers from the Target-funded group of schools – who are still receiving coaching – gathered at Children’s Literacy Initiative offices downtown.

“With the Chicago Board of Education, money is limited, and principals aren’t always given the amount of money needed to supply each classroom,” says Sylva Spraggins, a 3^rd-grade teacher at Armour Elementary. “To have the complexity [of books] the Common Core State Standards is looking for is hard. The complexity of the texts is so much better than a lot of the programs that schools can get for cheap.”

All the teachers have copies of others’ read-aloud collections, so they can share books, Spraggins says.

Laura Carbajal, a kindergarten teacher at Armour, says that with the Intentional Read Aloud, “kids are more engaged in the reading. It’s more focused. It takes more planning.”

A few weeks later, in class, Carbajal and coach Sharon Lyons have the students sing a song about Message Time. “My message today is going to be from the book ‘The Grouchy Ladybug,’ ” Lyons says. “It’s going to be about the bug.”

The vocabulary words are “grouchy” and “aphids.” The sight words are “and,” “of,” “on” and “the.”

“Let me see a grouchy face,” Lyons says.

She introduces the topic by asking students what aphids are. “Who eats the aphids?” she asks next. Then she reviews the sight words students will see in the message.

As Lyons writes the message out, students predict what she is trying to say. “The grouchy ladybug sat on to…” she writes. The students chime in, saying “the.”

“Can I write ‘the’ with ‘t-o?’ ” she asks. The students realize they are mistaken about what she is going to write, and follow along as she finishes: “The grouchy ladybug sat on top of the leaf and it ate aphids.”

 “This is the time in the message that three students come up,” Lyons says. One girl chooses to focus on the word “the.” They “dribble and shoot” the letters in the word to review its spelling.

Then comes a more sophisticated lesson. Lyons draws a box around both instances of “the” in the sentence and asks if they look the same. The girl says no. Lyons points out it’s because the “T” in “the” at the beginning of the sentence is upper-case.

Carbajal says the preschool teacher at the school also uses Message Time Plus, and observes how she does it to learn from her.

“It’s like the ball keeps rolling – what she can do for my kindergartners, and what I can do for the 1^st graders?”

Principal Kenya Sadler proudly shows off this new feature of her school. Sadler raised private money to install it because she thought the specially designed environment would benefit the children in her schools’ two classes for children with autism.

Now, Sadler is desperately hoping that the room doesn’t wind up behind shuttered doors, unused. She’s also worried about the students in the autism program, not to mention the rest of her students, plus their parents, whom she fears will be left scrambling if Brown is closed. Brown’s building is 34 percent utilized and it is a Level 3 school, making it a prime candidate for closure.

Sadler’s concerns underscore one of the underlying factors in the hot-button issue of school closings. As enrollment dwindled at schools now considered underutilized, principals and central office administrators often took the opportunity to fill the empty rooms. Often, the empty space was transformed into classrooms for special education children—called cluster programs, since they drew children from a cluster of nearby schools—or into pre-kindergarten classrooms.

More on school closings

Schools still on the list after commission recommendations

Maps

Under-utilized schools continue to shed students

Most underutilized schools in black neighborhoods

History of school closings

Neighborhood high schools losing area students

Like the one at Brown for autistic students, special education cluster programs draw students with severe disabilities from all the other area schools.

More than half of all special education cluster programs are in underutilized schools, according to CPS data. Though CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett has taken some of the underutilized schools off the table, a third of the schools still at risk of being shut down house special education cluster programs.

Advocates are worried that district officials are not taking a strategic look at special education. For one, they note that the utilization formula does not take into account the fact that separate, self-contained classrooms for special education students are legally mandated to have smaller class sizes. If the smaller classes were accounted for, some schools would not be considered underutilized.

In a letter to the School Utilization Commission, Rod Estvan of the group Access Living points out that if all schools on the list were shut down, CPS at a minimum would have to find space for 60 special education classes. Estvan calls that a daunting task.

Margie Wakelin, an attorney for Equip for Equality, says that a group of attorneys have raised the issue of what happens to students with disabilities in the midst of school closings. They fear that the closings will have a disproportionate impact on special education students.

When the district has shut down schools with cluster programs in the past, Wakelin says she has been contacted by parents who reported that their children didn’t get the needed special education services when they were transferred to new schools.

“To just say that the IEP (individual education plan) follows the child is not enough,” Wakelin says. Sometimes the receiving school doesn’t get a student’s complete file for months after the start of the school year.

Plus, it can be hard for children with emotional disabilities to transition to new schools, she says.

Preschools also an issue

Also, most of the schools still on the list—nearly 90 percent—currently house pre-kindergarten programs. At the same time city and CPS officials are making decisions about school closings, they also are in the process of re-distributing preschool slots, says Maria Whelan, president of Illinois Action for children. Early childhood officials are “well aware” of what is going on at CPS, she adds.

Brown Elementary, located on the Near West Side, also has a pre-kindergarten program. Though the rest of the grades might lack students, Sadler points out that the preschool has a waiting list.

The Near West Side has experienced an explosion in new residents, many of them families with young children. At Brown, neighborhood children come to the preschool, Sadler says, and it attracts a diverse group. But in kindergarten, the diversity disappears.

The neighborhood has a wealth of elementary school for these middle-class parents to choose from. Two new magnet schools opened over the past decade, and the Near West Side now has more specialty schools than any other community in the city.

Sadler says she has started a discussion with the preschool parents about what it would take to get them to stay.
“We are fighting against the grain,” she says.

Brown, however, is not alone in its dilemma. The principal of a half-empty school in Englewood says that whenever a child leaves his preschool, he can quickly fill the spot with another child from the waiting list. (The principal asked that his name not be used.) Englewood and other predominantly black communities have the most schools at risk of being shuttered.

This year, the principal says, he had to fill out a long application for the city’s new competitive process that will award preschool funding to schools and community organizations. It was an arduous task, one that he would rather have avoided if the school is going to be shut down anyway, he says.

If the school is closed or doesn’t receive preschool funds, he fears that neighborhood children won’t go to any preschool at all. Most of the children walk to the school with parents or older siblings.

“If it is too far, they will just leave the little ones at home,” he says.

Antoinette Thomas, who has taught in the preschool for nine years, says that providing the program to her students in the low-income neighborhood of Englewood is especially important. “If they take the preschool away, it will be a disservice to our community,” she says. “This is what levels the playing field.”

Inside the school, Thomas has a big classroom with a turtle and a hamster. Like most preschool classes, it is divided into different areas, such as the dramatic play area, the science area and the alphabet area.

Whelan says the city has devised an intricate process in which officials will look at small areas in a community and determine the demand for preschool. Funding will be awarded accordingly.

Because the school closing process and the preschool competitive process are happening simultaneously, Whelan is hopeful that children will not be left out.

“Right now, the early childhood program is extremely flexible,” she says.

Assets that parents want

Since special education and prekindergarten classes serve the most vulnerable students, advocates are especially worried about how they will fare under the closings process. But CPS data also shows that underutilized schools tend to have the assets that parents want.

According to CPS data, almost all elementary schools have libraries. The difference is that 90 percent of schools at capacity or overcrowded schools have a library and a librarian, but only 75 percent of underutilized schools have a librarian.

More than 80 percent of underutilized schools also have science labs and 96 percent have computer labs.
Sadler, like many principals, has used her classrooms to provide a slew of extras for her students—usually by relying on grants or outside partners to foot the bill.

Brown Elementary has a fitness center, paid for by the Chicago Bulls, whose parking lots are across the street from the school.  Sadler has arranged for a personal trainer from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Department of Kinesiology and Nutrition to work with the gym teacher on developing a program.

The school also has a STEM lab and a teacher to teach engineering, whose salary is paid for with a grant. 
One room is set aside for volunteers who come in on a daily basis to read with children who are struggling academically.  Sadler has recruited 75 volunteers.

Plus, Brown has a parent room, with a couch and computers donated by a partner. Parents can use the room to work on their resume, and some of the preschool parents come to hang out while their children are in the shorter program, which operates for 2-1/2 hours.

Yet Sadler doesn’t want the school to become a magnet or other specialty school. She wants it to remain a place where neighborhood students have the right to a seat.

“We have a lot of resources here and don’t want to be just another name on the list,” Sadler says.

The fate of all the schools that have been subject to some action, whether closure or turnaround, gives a glimpse into what can be expected this year as CPS embarks on what is expected to be the largest number of closures ever. Byrd-Bennett has said she has no exact number in mind, but reports have indicated officials are considering closing as many as 100 schools considered under-utilized.
An analysis of school closings and other actions found that:

• Fifteen percent of the replacement schools (those located in buildings where either closure or turnaround has occurred) were rated “Level 1” by CPS, the highest performance level, according to the most recent data. Thirty-two percent were rated “Level 3,” the lowest rating CPS gives, and 20 percent did not have enough data. When looking only at closed schools turned into new schools, 45 percent were level 3.
• Closings and turnarounds have disproportionately affected African American schools on the West and South Sides. Humboldt Park and the Near West Side had the most, followed by Grand Boulevard. South Chicago had the third most school closings.
• Closings are clustered around former Chicago Housing Authority developments.
• Almost all of the schools that closed were neighborhood schools with attendance boundaries. Now, half of the replacement schools admit students by either lottery or test scores.

CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll has said the point of this round of school closings is to shrink the district’s “footprint.” However, district officials say they will continue the expansion of charter schools.

This year, new charter schools are being put in neighborhoods that have overcrowded schools and those in need of “quality” schools--which could be the same neighborhoods where schools are closed.

CPS officials also have yet to announce which schools, if any, will be turned around this year, a process in which most or all of an entire staff is replaced. In the past, 65 percent of turnaroundshave been managed by the not-for-profit Academy for Urban School Leadership.

Vacated buildings were taken over mostly by charter schools as part of a strategy launched under former Mayor Richard M. Daley.

On April 10, 2002, then CPS Chief Executive Officer Arne Duncan announced CPS would permanently close three schools it said were chronically low-performing and not improving—Williams, Dodge and Terrell. The district vowed to open completely new schools at Williams and Dodge, while Terrell would remain closed due to declining enrollment.

“We don’t believe these schools as they currently exist will ever measure up,” Duncan said at the time. “There are better education alternatives within walking distance.”

It was Chicago’s introduction to “renaissance” schools, which became a full-fledged strategy under Daley’s Renaissance 2010 plan to close 100 low-performing schools and open new ones, mostly charters. The hope was that a new school or an outside entity other than the school district could create higher-performing schools from the ashes of those shuttered.

Since then, CPS has closed or completely re-staffed more than 100 schools. The announcement of “school actions”—closings, consolidations, turnarounds—has occurred annually since 2002, and has provoked anguished criticism that has still not dissipated.
Building on a map created by Catalyst Chicago and WBEZ last year, WBEZ plotted annual school closings and turnarounds since Williams, Terrell and Dodge.

The chart and map show where schools have been closed or turned around, what’s become of the old buildings and how well the new schools in those buildings are performing.

—Jane Verwys created the graphics for this article. Reporting was a joint effort of WBEZ and Catalyst Chicago.

School clinicians say they are seeing more students who are dangerously depressed, psychotic or aggressive, prompting them to call the hotline more often. Most of the school calls originate in Chicago, but the trend extends across the state, according to data from the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services for 2007 through 2011 (the latest available). (See graphic.)

A hotline call is often a sure-fire way—perhaps the only way, in some cases—for clinicians, teachers and other school personnel to get help for a troubled child. A call triggers an assessment of the child via telephone and then, if the child shows severe symptoms, an immediate assessment by a community mental health agency. More than two-thirds of children who spent any time in a psychiatric hospital in 2011 came through this assessment process.

Once a child is referred for an assessment, he or she automatically receives therapy for 90 days from the mental health agency, regardless of whether they are hospitalized. Social workers and others consider this process the quickest way to get help for a child.

Last year, at least 10,000 children were admitted to a psychiatric hospital on the same day they were evaluated as a result of a hotline call. About 20 percent of the children were admitted more than once—a sign, experts say, of the lack of follow-up services for children once they are released.

The deluge of hotline calls and the increase in hospitalizations—up from 7,000 five years ago—is at least partly due to cuts in funding for community mental health services, experts also note.

“There is a documented link between stressors in the community and mental health,” says Collette Lueck, managing director for the Illinois Children’s Mental Health Partnership, a state initiative aimed at improving services. “We know the number of children exposed to violence has increased and that can take its toll.”

Children who are exposed to trauma often become depressed or feel helpless, Lueck says; in turn, they may act out and become disruptive in schools. CPS has trained school staff to call the hotline “if a student is in crisis -- no matter the nature of the crisis – [so] that the student can be properly screened and assessed,” says spokesman Frank Shuftan.

Chris Carroll, who runs the evaluation unit for the Community Counseling Center of Chicago, says more cases of aggression in children are surfacing, with much of the behavior linked to trauma. The Community Counseling Center of Chicago on the North Side runs the largest assessment unit in the state, responsible for an area that stretches from West Ridge on the far North Side to Austin on the West Side. (The agency also serves some north suburbs.)

“Schools see the behavior, and they don’t know where it is coming from,” Carroll says. “When children see killings or are victims of child abuse, they react to those things.”

Many community-based centers that could provide help for children have closed down, and those that are still open often have long waiting lists.

Illinois ranks third in the nation for cuts to mental health services, according to a November 2011 report by the National Association of Mental Illness. Funding for community mental health services for children was reduced by 13 percent between fiscal year 2009 and 2012, according to a budget analysis done by Illinois KidsCount, an annual report with data on children and families.

“Children who do not get treatment in the community wind up coming through the crisis door,” Carroll says. “CPS sees everything, from aggressive children to psychotic children, and they are the least-trained to deal with it.

The assessment system has long been used by the state’s Department of Children and Family Services, to curtail the flow of foster children into psychiatric hospitals. In 2004, it was expanded to serve any child without insurance or with public insurance, such as Medicaid or KidsCare. About half of the children in Illinois have public insurance, according to Illinois KidsCount.

The expansion was born out of the Illinois Children’s Mental Health Partnership, whose executive committee wanted the hotline and assessment system to serve more children and prevent the over-use of psychiatric hospitalization, an expensive option that experts say should be used as a last resort when children are a danger to themselves or others.

Severe crises, more hospitalizations

 At a large North Side high school, one social worker describes several situations that prompted her to call the hotline. [The social worker asked that her name and school not be published for privacy reasons.]

In one case, a student told the social worker that she had tried to commit suicide by taking dozens of pills, leaving the empty bottles on her nightstand. She woke up later, but her mother wouldn’t acknowledge the suicide attempt.

In another case, a child told her that he talks to ghosts.  

Yet another student was so aggressive, angry, and out-of-control that the social worker feared another Columbine-style shooting. The young man was admitted to the hospital; he has since been released and is back at school. She tries to keep a close eye on him, yet notes that she’s the only social worker in the school of nearly 1,500 students.

“We see a lot here,” she says. “Sometimes I think this is the job from hell.”

When she questions whether or not to call the hotline, she first calls Community Counseling Center of Chicago. Sometimes she is advised to call the hotline. But in other instances, the agency tells her to see if she can talk the parent into getting the child help in the community—and often the parent doesn’t take that action.

“I had one student who was muttering and wouldn’t make eye contact and was acting really bizarre, but the family didn’t want services,” the social worker recalls. She tries to keep an eye on him, too.

Troubled children, in fact, are often caught between a mental health system that is stretched thin and a parent who has trouble making time to deal with the problem, says Ashley Fountaine, a project manager with the Chicago chapter of the National Association of Mental Illness. Hospitalization is not always a bad option, Fountaine adds, because it serves a purpose in extreme cases.

Sometimes the assessment teams get pressure from schools to hospitalize a child, according to team directors. Carroll says there have been cases in which exasperated school staff will threaten a child with hospitalization—then become angry when the crisis team refuses.

“People don’t understand that hospitals don’t fix kids,” Carroll says. “They stabilize them. The real work has to be done in the community.”

In Chicago, two-thirds of children who undergo assessments are admitted into hospitals, compared to about half of children downstate and in the suburbs, according to a Catalyst Chicago analysis. Even so, school personnel sometimes believe that assessment teams decline hospitalization because of the cost

Maria Lupe, who runs the assessment unit at Mt. Sinai Hospital on the West Side, says her team gets more calls about severe problems in young children, such as one call about a 1^st-grader whose behavior was out of control. But Lupe also get calls from schools about situations that she considers less than urgent. One clue is if the school has sent a child home.

“Why would you send them home if they were in danger?” she says.

Unequal resources

Community mental health agencies and school personnel say that even more children could be kept out of hospitals if the resources in schools and neighborhoods were better.

At schools, social workers are assigned by the district based on the needs of special education students.  Overall, CPS has about 360 social workers and a student enrollment of about 350,000—a ratio of about 1 social worker for every 1,000 students, far above the ratio recommended by the National Association of Social Workers of one school social worker for every 250 students.

 With such workloads, a crisis is often the first and only time the social worker will encounter a child who is not in special education.

As a result, says social worker Susan Hickey, social workers have little time either for students who are not in special education or for prevention work. When Hickey gets wind of a student struggling with emotional issues, she refers the family to a community health clinic. But often, the parent doesn’t follow up.

Assessment teams used to go into schools to do presentations on mental health and provide information about services. But the state no longer provides money for such outreach, says Michelle Churchey-Mims, director of children’s mental health and child welfare services for Metropolitan Family Services.

With grant money, Metropolitan Family Services sometimes provides therapy services in schools, and the number of mental health crises in these schools seems to be lower, Churchey-Mims says.

Jennifer Schultz, secretary for the Illinois School Psychologist Association, has first-hand experience with the disparity in resources. She left Indian Springs School District in the working-class suburb of Justice for a job at Homewood-Flossmoor High School in a more affluent south suburb. Now she works with three other psychologists and four social workers—in all, 11 clinicians for 2,800 students, with some dedicated solely to general education students and others focused on those in special education.

In this environment, Schultz says she has ample time to provide therapy for individual students and intervention before problems become severe.

Children in every community have struggles, notes Caroll of Community Counseling Center. “We go to Orr and Westinghouse and we go to Glenbard South. The big difference is the resources.”

Lack of hospital space, child psychiatrists

Hotline calls may provide immediate help for children facing a crisis. But the larger, systemic problems with the mental health system do not disappear, and often come back to haunt them.

Assessment teams sometimes cannot find a hospital bed for a child, or can only find a bed far away from the child’s home. Some communities have few hospitals with a psychiatric unit that will take children.

Roseland Hospital recently opened a psychiatric unit for teenagers and Ingalls Hospital in Harvey has an inpatient psychiatric unit for children, says Churchey-Mims. If these units are full, a child from the South Side or suburbs will have to go to the West Side or the Northwest suburbs, a hardship on families.

At Mt. Sinai, Maria Lupe works closely with psychiatric hospitals to figure out what is the best match with the child. One of the criteria she considers is whether they have Spanish-speaking staff, since most of her clients are Latino.

Though she is willing to send children to any area, it can still be difficult to secure a bed. “Overcrowding is a big thing,” Lupe says. “Sometimes they have no beds available and we have to go to hospitals farther away from the neighborhood.”

Another issue is a dearth of child psychiatrists in many communities, which makes it difficult to schedule follow-up appointments. An appointment is particularly important if a child has been placed on medication.  

“We have work to do once they are released,” Lupe says.

The state requires that children released from hospitals see a psychiatrist within 14 days. To meet this requirement, Carroll set up clinic hours with Counseling Center’s two psychiatrists. Several families get an appointment for a given time, and they are seen on a first come, first serve basis.

Carroll admits it’s not an ideal setup, but says it is the only way he can meet the requirement.

Further, after the crisis team’s 90-day monitoring of the child, there’s no guarantee of follow-up.

“Everything in crisis is immediate,” he says. “Everything after that is questionable.”

Some 330 schools are considered under-utilized by CPS, which calculates its rate based on a figure of 30 students per classroom plus ancillary rooms for art, library and special education students. District leaders refuse to say how many schools will be on the chopping block.

School action guidelines allow the CEO to consider a host of other factors, including safety, leadership and whether the school has recently been affected by any school actions. This might mean that recent turnaround schools—a process in which an entire staff is fired and replaced and the district, and in some cases the federal government, provide extra money for improvements—may be spared.

Also, if it costs too much to move students from one building to another or if no better schools are nearby, a school may be saved.

The data also show that 28 charter schools are rated as under-utilized, but 11 of those just recently opened and six of them are adding grades. Only three of the under-utilized charter schools are losing enrollment. They are Betty Shabazz Charter High School—DuSable, Urban Prep—Englewood and ACE Technical Charter School.

CPS officials say they will consider utilization status when renewing a charter school. Shabazz and ACE are up for renewal this year.

For the first time this year, CPS officials included, with the utilization rates, data on the enrollment trends of the building and the cost to keep it maintained with any necessary repairs. That information shows that 230 of the 330 underutilized schools lost enrollment and of those, 36 percent lost one-fifth of their population over the past two years.

CPS officials also have made a point of emphasizing the number of schools that are more than half under-utilized. Spokeswoman Becky Carroll says this should not be considered an indication that these schools will be targeted.

Those schools that are more than 50 percent under-utilized are way more likely to serve African American students and be rated as Level 3, the worst rating given by the district.

The map below shows all underutilized schools, with those more than half empty identified by the red marker.

But they have not yet put out the list of schools that are in that category. Spokeswoman Robyn Ziegler says that this year’s utilization rates aren't required to be available until the end of December. The only available information is from last year.

This means that next week, the Commission on School Utilization will be holding meetings in communities to get their feedback on school closings without any firm information on how many schools in the neighborhood might be targeted.

Commission Chairman Frank Clark said on Monday at the first hearing that he was hankering for a list of underutilized schools.

Last year’s data shows that about 120 schools (not including those that were closed last year, are being phased out or are in the process of adding grades) were half under-utilized.

Only seven of the schools are on the North or Northwest Side of the city. Most are on the South, Southwest and Far South Side of the city. Englewood, a neighborhood that has already seen a fair number of schools close, still has nine schools that are 50 percent under-utilized.

East Garfield Park follows as the community area with the second most severely under-utilized schools. Two of the neighborhood’s high schools—Manley and Marshall—are on that list.

As many have suspected, the closings will likely disproportionately affect black students. More than 84 percent of the students in the schools that are 50 percent under-utilized are black and 12 percent are Latino.

They also are largely low-performing schools. About 67 percent are Level 3 schools, which is the worst rating CPS hands out.

“It is a win-win,” Miranda said.

The research study Miranda was recruiting for is part of a federally funded expansion of Chicago’s Child Parent Centers program, an initiative that has dwindled dramatically since it was first launched but is still cited by experts and advocates as a prime example of the positive impact of high-quality early learning.

The latest expansion comes through the Investing in Innovation, or i3, grant program started under U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

This time around, CPS has created six new sites, bringing the total to 17, and given existing child-parent centers new resources. Other school districts are also participating, including Evanston/Skokie District 65 and Normal School District 5, in Illinois; Milwaukee Public Schools; and three Minnesota districts, including St. Paul Public Schools.

In Chicago, child-parent centers have had a rocky road. The pioneering preschool through 3^rd grade programs were launched with fanfare, then gradually cut back over the years due to school closings, declining enrollment and budget woes.

The goal of the new project is to replicate, on a broader scale, the positive results that the child-parent centers first produced when they were launched in the late 1960s. Research following the children who graduated from the centers showed that decades later, they had a greater chance of enrolling in colleges and getting skilled jobs, as well as fewer felony arrests and lower rates of depression, than CPS students who didn’t attend the programs.

Though the centers are making a comeback with the i3 initiative, long-term funding and resources are still in doubt: The grant is only for four years. During that time, supports will follow students as they progress from preschool into the early elementary grades, but won’t be offered to new incoming students.

“It will not be much service, but it should give us some information,” former CPS Chief Early Childhood Officer Barbara Bowman said at a June meeting of the Illinois Early Learning Council.

Still, there are hopes that CPS could find more resources to extend the program. Arthur Reynolds, a University of Minnesota researcher who has studied child-parent centers for decades, says the different sites are trying to develop “sustainability and expansion plans” working with districts, state departments, and community agencies.

Parent participation key to success

Mayela Perez-Fajardo, the Edwards parent resource teacher, notes that the school’s parent agreement sets high expectations, asking parents to spend at least 3 hours a week participating in school events and doing educational activities at home.

The child-parent center program is “good for the community. It’s good for the school if they are going to receive more funds,” said Alma Lopez, the mother of a preschooler. “Hopefully it gives good results back, and we get more assistance.”

In preschool, class sizes will be capped at 17 children, and each class will get both a teacher and an aide. In 1^st through 3^rd-grade, class sizes will be no more than 25 students, and will also have a teacher and an aide.

The child-parent centers can also hire—if they don’t have them already—a head teacher, who serves as the instructional leader for preschool and kindergarten; a parent resource teacher, who offers activities for parents in the parent room; and a school-community liaison.

Barbara Relerford, the head teacher at Ferguson Child-Parent Center, says the school has used its funding to offer full-day preschool and to hire an additional teacher, an assistant and a school-community liaison.

“We are working on a resource book so parents can see what services are here in the community that we might not be aware of,” Relerford says. “One of my goals is to have [the liaison] make contacts with the neighborhood clinics and dental agencies and get those people to come in and talk to our parents.”

She says that attendance, “which in the early grades is always a struggle,” has improved with the full day program. “Maybe [parents] make an extra effort now,” she says. “It allows them to go out, go to school and get a job.”  A Catalyst Chicago analysis found that absenteeism is a serious problem in the early grades, especially preschool.

Push for alignment

Perhaps most importantly, the grant pays for training so that Relerford and other head teachers can learn how to align preschool and primary grades curricula.

At Ferguson, kindergarten teachers have attended professional development sessions with preschool teachers. At Peck Elementary, a summary of what teachers are working on goes to Erikson Institute consultants working on the study, including Bowman.

“The pre-K teachers are making sure they are matching all their topics to what the kindergarten is covering,” says head teacher Dawn Donahue. For instance, preschool teachers have begun using some parts of the Houghton-Mifflin language arts curriculum that kindergarten teachers use, and kindergarten teachers are using activities from the Blueprint for Early Literacy curriculum, used in preschool, to increase the consistency students get.

For the first time, preschool students at Peck are working on skills like “blending and segmenting phonemes,” or pulling apart and putting together the sounds in words. These skills previously weren’t taught until kindergarten.

To make the material appropriate for preschool, Donahue says, students might tap their shoulders while saying the different sounds c- and –at in the word “cat.”  “There’s a lot of movement with the little ones,” Donahue explains.

The summer 2011 issue of Catalyst In Depth, “Transitioning to Kindergarten,” found that many students face a rocky path into kindergarten and receive an uneven start in school.

Donahue says that although the school only offers half-day preschool, it has also seen attendance increase by several percentage points to nearly 100 percent.

Peck has instituted parent workshops nearly every day, based on results of a survey on parents’ interests, such as learning about nutrition, how to get a GED and how to develop their children’s math and reading skills.

“Students are not only happy to see their parents be part of this program, but also we are helping the parents to work with them more effectively at home,” Donahue says.

Michael Vargas, one of the teachers featured by Catalyst, landed a job teaching 8th-grade bilingual education at Calmeca Academy. 

Angel Torres was offered a full-tuition scholarship to complete a master’s degree in math education at Northeastern Illinois University. He took it, and will spend another year learning instead of teaching.

Torres had several reasons for opting to take the scholarship. One is the chance to build confidence.

 “I knew I wasn’t prepared to go out and teach at this time. I wanted to stay in school and take a couple more classes,” he says.

Second, the math endorsement that Torres will earn makes him more marketable, adding to endorsements he has already earned in social studies, history and English. “I wanted to have options,” Torres says. “The schools I am applying to work for, I want to make sure I can get in. If a job is offered in a specific subject, I want to make sure I can cover that subject and stay in the neighborhood. “

He’s not alone. Of the 22 Grow Your Own graduates in the evaluation released this summer, 36 percent are currently enrolled in graduate programs and another 45 percent say they plan to participate. With a tough job market in CPS, one principal advised Grow Your Own that it should “let (candidates) know Chicago is challenging, and they should have endorsements before going out to get a job.”

Student enrollment in Illinois is expected to decline through 2015, according to a 2011 report from the Illinois State Board of Education, and fewer students will mean tougher job searches for teachers. The trend is likely to hold for teachers elsewhere, too: According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, the number of students is stagnant in many other Midwestern states and declining in the Northeast, as well.

Reached over the summer, Torres said he also feared that if he took a job, he would lose pay should teachers strike—which they did.

“My wife just lost her job at the state, so I needed to make sure there was an income,” Torres said at the time. As a master’s student at Northeastern Illinois University, he was able to keep his full-time job at People’s Gas.

Constrained by funding

Grow Your Own is intended to help increase diversity in the teaching force by training candidates who already have ties to underserved communities, helping them to complete their bachelor’s degrees and become teachers. In CPS, the workforce has recently experienced a decline in the number of African-American teachers, coupled with a substantial gap between the percentage of students and the percentage of teachers who are Latino.

The district agreed to a provision in the most recent Chicago Teachers Union contract that will create a plan for recruiting more minority teachers. CTU staff coordinator Jackson Potter says he thinks the district should look at models like Grow Your Own.

But an evaluation of the program released this summer noted that, despite positive ratings of graduates on a modified Charlotte Danielson Framework for Teaching, and good reviews from principals, not all the 33 Chicago graduates have found jobs.

Of the 33, most are teaching in CPS—but 10 are not. Of those 10, two are hunting for CPS jobs (one is subbing in the meantime), two are working in schools but not as teachers, two are teaching outside the district, three are in graduate school, and one is still working to get her credentials from the state.

One program coordinator told researchers in the evaluation that “the GYO model is great when the state budget is in average to good condition. When state finances and the economy constrict teacher hiring, district finances and state funding, the model breaks down and is not functional.”

Another barrier is the slow trickle of teacher candidates into the schools—just 70 so far have graduated, 33 in Chicago and 37 elsewhere in the state. Grow Your Own is moving to address this issue.  Community groups—which partner to offer Grow Your Own—and universities around the state have toughened the screening process for applicants in order to ensure they’re more likely to finish, the evaluation noted.

Anne Hallett, the director of Grow Your Own Illinois, says that the program has adopted a “Pre-Grow Your Own” strategy to strengthen recruitment. Five of the community organizations require candidates to take several college classes—such as math—without assistance from the program. The candidates also participate in Grow Your Own student activities.

“This allows the candidate to assess if he or she can succeed in college courses and if being an active member of a GYO cohort is a good fit for her or him,” Hallett notes. The strategy also lets Grow Your Own figure out if the candidate can succeed academically and commit to the program.

CPS trimmed about $10 million from area offices, now called network offices. Yet the number of central office staff increased, as did the money spent on their paychecks--by about $2.79 million, with more administrators earning six-figure salaries.  

CPS budgeted $50 million more for central office personnel in the 2013 budget than it did last year.

The district says that of the 1,258 positions in central office, 189 are vacant and that many of them won’t be filled. However, all 1,258 are included in its 2013 budget, according to the district’s interactive budget website. 

The current administration has done a fundamental restructuring in central office and there is a lot of movement in positions, says spokeswoman Robyn Ziegler. She insists that looking at aggregate numbers does not show the whole picture.

“It is not [comparing] apples-to-apples,” she says.  

Rod Estvan, a veteran policy and budget analyst for the advocacy group Access Living, says that the board may indeed intend to make the cuts it announces but finds, as the year goes on, that additional staff are needed for one purpose or another.

“It is not necessarily a sleight of hand,” he says.

And while central office staffing has crept up recently, it is significantly smaller than it was five years ago. In 2007, there were about 1,600 employees in central office.

Lots of new faces

The central office has experienced a radical turnover in personnel compared to a mere two years ago, according to the Catalyst Chicago analysis of employee rosters for the past three years. Less than a quarter of the people who worked at district headquarters at 125 S. Clark Street in 2010 are still working there.  

As more newcomers arrived, CPS officials ponied up more money for top-level administrators. Currently, 30 top central administrators earn $150,000 or more, up from 21 in 2011 and 14 in 2010.

All but one department chief is new to the job (the exception is  Alicia Winckler who is still the chief talent officer). In all, CEO Jean-Claude Brizard has 17 chiefs of departments, plus a budget officer. Among them are administrators holding new titles, such as chief portfolio officer and chief health officer. 

The portfolio chief and the recently hired chief transformation officer are part of the district’s effort to transition to a full-fledged “portfolio” district. In portfolio districts, all schools have the same autonomy as charter schools, in that they buy services rather than merely being given support from central office, says Betheny Gross, senior research analyst for the Center on Reinventing Public Education.

Gross says the hiring of Transformation Chief Todd Babbitz signals to her the intent to completely overhaul the district. He is being paid $195,000 to run the Office of Strategic Management.

Babbitz, who has worked for consulting firms but has no experience in education, has been charged with implementing the long-term vision of the district and serving as a “strategic thought partner,” according to CPS. Like former CEO Ron Huberman, he hails from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Under Huberman, the district had only nine department chiefs and, for most of the time covered by the employee rosters, the 

Turnover bad for students

The Chicago Teachers Union is concerned about how the upheaval in central office affects children, says CTU researcher Sarah Hainds.

At a recent Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force meeting, district officials said that all the people who were in charge of the transition plans for students in closing schools had left the district and failed to leave paper-work about the plans, she said. As a result, the new staff was able to reach only about 40 percent of the students to remind them what school they will be attending in September.

 “It really seems like there is absolutely no historical knowledge of anything coming out of central office,” Hainds says.

Schools also have to adjust to a new configuration and role for the mid-level bureaucracy.  

Huberman made good on his commitment to staff up the area offices, with resources from attendance coordinators to intervention specialists. His philosophy was that the area offices were close enough to the schools to force change.

Networks also are part of the portfolio school district lingo, Gross says. In New York City, also a portfolio school district, schools select their network based on similar needs and identifications.

Brizard’s administration assigned schools to networks based on geographic areas.

He and his team, however, have reduced the number of workers in the networks by about 100.

Despite the smaller number of staff, CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll said schools and families are getting the support they need. Brizard’s administration has also created parent and school support centers, giving parents and principals a place to call should they need assistance.

“We have a far more robust network team and school support staff in place to directly aid schools and parents,” she argues.  She adds that some central office programs were eliminated so that money, staff and funds could go out to the schools.

Mass exodus of principals

CPS employee rosters also show a high turnover in principals--at a time when a pension enhancement program made retirement attractive for many veterans. Between 2010 and 2012, 341 principals, or about 44 percent of the total, left their jobs.  

Hainds of the CTU says the union is concerned that it will be difficult for them to handle increased autonomy – another CPS goal—with less support from networks and central office.

As for teachers, their numbers are down by 477 in the employee rosters but that may change. CPS agreed in August to hire about 500 new teachers to help staff an extension of the school day and to add enrichment activities.

In previous years, Urban Prep has claimed 100 percent of its grads were admitted to college, only to see official figures for college enrollment from the National Student Clearinghouse come in much lower – 76 percent for 2010. This year is different, with Clearinghouse data yielding 91 percent.

Urban Prep Founder Tim King says he believes the Clearinghouse has undercounted the charter school’s college enrollment. Still, he’s proud.  “It is incredibly high given the population we serve,” says King. “Traditionally low-income black males have the lowest college-going rates.”

Overall, nearly 60 percent of 2011 CPS graduates enrolled in college last fall, up from 56 percent in 2010, according to Clearinghouse data CPS quietly posted on its post-secondary website. Black and Latino males continue to trail other groups, but both saw increases of 5 percentage points.

“It is really good news,” says Eliza Moeller, a lead researcher for the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. She says the college enrollment rate has been flat for a while, going up only 1 or 2 percentage points each year. “It is exciting to see progress.”

CPS’ college enrollment rate is nearing that of the national average, which in 2008 was 63 percent, according to Tom Mortenson, senior scholar at The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington and an independent higher-education policy analyst living in Oskaloosa, Iowa.

College enrollment rates have been stagnant across the nation, except for low-income students, who have increasingly enrolled in college, he says. Mortenson previously worked for the Illinois State Scholarship Commission and says the improvement in Chicago is remarkable.

“To see Chicago go from a hopeless situation to a place where there is progress being made is one of the miracles of my lifetime,” he says.

However, only about 58 percent of CPS students graduate, compared to the national graduation rate of 75 percent, according to CPS data and figures from the Alliance for Excellent Education. (The graduation rate also has improved over the past decade.)

How different groups fared

At 55 percent, neighborhood high schools continued to post the lowest college-enrollment rates among all types of schools, but they saw the biggest jump -- about 3.4 percent.

The city’s five turnaround high schools—Orr, Marshall, Harper, Fenger and Phillips—saw a slight decrease and  continued to have some of the lowest rates in the district, from an average of 43 percent to 42 percent. In 2008 and 2009, these high schools had their entire staffs revamped and received substantial district and federal investments.

Urban Prep’s increase in college enrollment drove a 1 percentage point jump for charter schools as a whole.

Perspectives-Calumet, Noble Street’s main campus, and ACE Charter School in Garfield Park saw sizeable increases of more than 10 percent. The two high schools run by Aspira were the only charters that enrolled just half of their graduates.

For the most part, the data are a testament to the Arne Duncan administration. The current CPS leadership was just coming into office when the Class of 2011 was graduating and packing their bags for college.

Duncan’s team, led by Greg Darnieder, sought, for the first time, to find out how many CPS grads enrolled in college. When the numbers first came in, in 2004, they were shocked: Only 43 percent of grads had made that transition to higher education. 

They responded with a number of initiatives. For example: Holding principals accountable for getting each student to fill out financial aid forms and apply to colleges, and giving high schools college coaches to help students choose and follow through. With up to 350 students each, regular counselors had little time for this.

They have taken these initiatives to Washington D.C. and currently have a pilot program in several states to track financial aid completion rates. Experts say providing schools data that showed which students had completed financial aid forms is key.

“This undoubtedly changed the conversation for us,” says Kim Cook, executive director of the National College Access Network.

Also, she says her agency and several not-for-profit agencies have taken up the work of college coaches and are partnering with schools to provide extra support for college counselors.

Future efforts uncertain

On Tuesday, CPS officials announced that CPS 2012 graduates were awarded nearly $276 million in scholarships, up from $147 million in 2011.

CPS officials attributed the increase to monthly bulletins alerting students to opportunities and informational meetings. Next year, officials plan to hold a “strategic scholarship training day” for student leaders.”

Liz Monge-Pacheco, the post-secondary coach for the Network for College Success, says that this year, the district has been good about trying to pull together the data on scholarships. However, she points out that students might be awarded multiple scholarships at different schools and will often not be able to use all that is given to them.

Monge-Pacheco works closely with the post-secondary teams in six schools and she says that the environment has gotten harder for students to find money for college. One of the biggest challenges came this year when the Pell Grant adjusted its income requirements, making it harder for students to qualify for the full award.

“That made a difference for some of our students from choosing a four-year university vs. a two year,” she says.

Further, it is unclear what the current CPS administration plans to do to keep the college enrollment numbers rising. The centralized post-secondary office, which included specialists who worked with school teams, has now been whittled down to just a few people. Some network offices have post-secondary specialists, but still Monge-Pacheco says people are wondering who will help organize college tours and help individual schools navigate the process.

“There is a loss of resources this year,” she says. “CPS has put forth no plan on how they will support post-secondary enrollment.”

As part of its effort to close a huge budget gap, the district office told schools that if they want to keep their college coach, they will have to cover the cost completely with discretionary funds. Previously, central office chipped in.

Chief Administrative Officer Tim Cawley balked at the expense, saying he doesn’t understand why CPS would pay for coaches who aren’t certified counselors. The coaches were in addition to counselors, who often are responsible for a host of tasks including organizing graduation, assessments and crisis intervention.

Some principals have chosen to keep their college coach. Dunbar High School on the Near South Side saw their college enroll rate rise from about 50 percent to nearly 68 percent—the biggest increase among neighborhood high schools.

James Gorham is the director of Dunbar’s post-secondary department, a unit created when Camilla Covington started as principal two years ago. Gorham says he was hired as a college coach. While he does not have a counseling degree, he does hold a bachelor’s degree in psychology and has experience working with teens. Last year, CPS covered half his salary.

Gorham says he requires seniors to submit six college applications: two to schools that they could easily get into; two that have their major and that, given ACT and GPA scores, they could probably get into; and two “reach” schools. He also has seniors fill out at least three scholarship applications and the federal financial aid form.

Gorham and his team also follow up with students over the summer, making sure that they actually enroll in college and get themselves there. When Darnieder began collecting college enrollment information, one revelation was that there was a big disconnect in the number of students who said they were going to college and the number who enrolled.

Gorham says he finds that over the summer, many young people start to worry about going away.

“I try to get them to push through their fears,” he says. “We talk to them about the benefits of education and that this is the time to be selfish.”

Other concerns

The cutback in college coach funding is not the only development that concerns educators and organizations working on postsecondary issues. 

Sarah Duncan, who works with several schools as part of the University of Chicago’s Network for College Success, points out that the new school performance policy doesn’t include any reference to college enrollment. Instead, there’s a heavy focus on test scores. 

Recent studies have shown that high school grade-point averages and picking the right college, not test scores, are the most important factors for college success.

Meanwhile, Urban Prep still draws criticism -- for student turnover. In September 2007, some 178 freshmen started at Urban Prep, yet only 92 of them graduated in June 2011, according to CPS data. Among charter schools that are not alternative schools, Urban Prep has the highest five-year dropout rate, 35 percent, but that figure is still way better than the district’s dropout rate for black male students of 51 percent. Students that start at Urban Prep and transfer to another school where they graduate are not considered dropouts.

King acknowledges that Urban Prep is not the right environment for some students. Like many charter schools, Urban Prep has a strict discipline code.

“We are a charter school,” King says. “Students can choose to be here and they can choose not to be here. We won’t be for everyone … but we don’t abandon students. We give them second, third, fourth, 100^th chances.”

Editor's note: School-by-school information is contained in the attached Excel sheet.