In January, the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research released a report titled “School Closings in Chicago: Understanding Families’ Choices and Constraints for New School Enrollment.” The report, which is available online, presented a variety of data on how families chose where to send their kids for the 2013-2014 school year after Chicago Public Schools closed the doors of forty-seven elementary schools. In a two-part series, the Weekly aims to provide contextual background and reporting on some of the report’s findings. CPS assigned designated “welcoming schools” for all students whose schools had closed, but parents were not required to send their kids to these schools. Last week, the Weekly wrote that though the welcoming schools were rated higher than the closed schools—a key part of the city’s claim that the school closings improved students’ educational prospects—not all welcoming schools were significantly higher rated than the closed school they replaced, and that the test-score-based rating system itself was disputable. Nor did all parents choose to send their kids to the welcoming school, preferring other schools for a variety of factors, leaving some kids at schools with lower ratings than the closed school. This week, in the second installment, we consider some of the top factors that motivated parents’ choices as to whether to send their kids to the welcoming school—safety, proximity to home, and transportation among them—as well as CPS’s efforts to address these concerns with the Safe Passage program.
TRANSPORTATION IN CPS
The Chicago Public School system provides very little transportation of its own; school buses are provided in rare cases, for children with special needs, for those who cannot attend their neighborhood schools due to overcrowding, and for some students who attend certain magnet and selective enrollment schools. With limited school busing, most children in the system walk, have their parents drive them, or take public transportation. So when CPS closed forty-seven elementary schools, it is not surprising that distance and transportation were important considerations in parents’ choices about where to send their kids for the 2013-2014 school year.
Some paths to school are expensive, long, or dangerous. The report cited multiple parents who were worried about fighting or gang-related activity, and even that their children might possibly be mistaken for gang members. It also cited multiple parents for whom cost of transportation was an issue, whether this was because parents had jobs and could not take the time off to drive their children, or because they had multiple children and the costs of CTA added up too quickly. In cases where routes seemed prohibitive, some parents ultimately sent their children to lower-rated schools than those that had been shutdown.
In order to address transportation needs, CPS offered bus transportation to welcoming schools that were more than 0.8 miles from the student’s previous, closed school. However, according to the report, students were actually less likely to attend these six schools than their counterparts that did not provide transportation, likely because these schools were still in far away, unfamiliar neighborhoods. Furthermore, the CPS-provided buses usually picked up at the closed school site, not children’s homes, which further complicated transit efforts.
Transportation was not central to all parents’ decisions. Even when transportation is regularly provided within CPS, it is not always used. Chris Hewitt, Local School Council (LSC) member for Brentano Elementary School, which met CPS criteria for shutdown but ultimately stayed open, told the Weekly that this was the case when Brentano was a magnet school, “few or no students” from outside its neighborhood boundaries took the offered transportation. Cassandra Vickas of the LSC for Courtenay Language Arts Center, an elementary school that merged with Stockton Elementary School at Stockton’s location after the school closings, also said she doesn’t “think transportation has had a significant impact on kids getting to school, [either] before or after the merger.” Hewitt and Vickas believe that the lack of public school transportation provided by CPS has not negatively affected parents to the degree that the report found. Although transportation may have been central to some parents’ decisions in the wake of the shutdown, it was not a universal concern, and a variety of factors influenced families’ choices about the best schools for their children. (Lauren Poulson)
SCHOOL CLOSINGS AND SAFE PASSAGE
Each weekday morning and then again in the afternoon, on sunny days and in polar vortices, Chicago’s neighborhood streets are scattered with Safe Passage workers. The program, a CPS effort to keep students safe as they travel to and from school, employs adult monitors to guard routes known for violence or gang activity. With the recent closures, parents and community leaders expressed concern that students traveling further between home and school would face increased safety risks. In response, and with support from the municipal and state governments, the Safe Passage program has been continually expanded since the closings, most recently to a total of 133 routes in the fall, up from ninety-three in the 2013-2014 school year.
This fall’s $10 million expansion, funded by then-Governor Pat Quinn, came after the program had already been expanded for the 2013-2014 school year—the first year following the closings—with a significant portion dedicated to supporting Safe Passage workers stationed on routes near recently closed CPS sites, shepherding students to their designated “welcoming school.” The report states that in 2013 CPS spent $7.7 million to hire an additional 600 Safe Passage employees to patrol paths near closed schools, which, according to the City, doubled the program, begun in 2009 as part of CPS’s Culture of Calm safety initiative.
CPS has also recognized that not all students attend their assigned welcoming schools. In June 2014, CPS announced its fiscal year 2015 budget, which (separate from the $10 million increase funded by the governor) included $1 million to support six new routes for schools that attracted students from closed schools, even though they had not been “designated” welcoming schools. According to the city’s press release for this fall’s expansion, “there had been no major incidents involving students on Safe Passage routes near schools during the program’s operational hours” after the program doubled for the 2013-2014 year.
The program has grown steadily in size since its inception, but this fall’s investment marks Safe Passage’s biggest expansion to date. For students with limited transportation options and who walk to school, Safe Passage is intended as a safety net, an assurance to parents that community members are keeping watch over their children as they trek through the neighborhood each day. CPS hires Safe Passage workers through the community groups who live near the routes they monitor.
“It is so important to hire community organizations that are very familiar and already entrenched in the communities where these schools reside,” CPS’s Chief Safety and Security Officer, Jadine Chou, said in a DNAinfo article from August when Safe Passage celebrated its five-year anniversary.
CPS sent Safe Passage maps to all families with students displaced by school closures. According to the report, though some families’ safety concerns were quelled by the Safe Passage expansion, some were not. Interviewers found that when parents decided whether or not to enroll their student in their assigned welcoming school, safety inside and outside the school building was a primary factor. In some cases, students were enrolled in non-welcoming schools because parents felt the commute was safer. The report suggests that better tailored neighborhood Safe Passage plans could be a solution to this issue. (Olivia Myszkowski)