The CPS district has been in a major budget deficit since the pandemic and it has only gotten worse in recent years as we are seeing the effects of it in Lane.
A budget deficit is when a government or organization’s spending exceeds their funding, essentially putting them into a debt. This leaves said government or organization to need to find ways to close the deficit or risk borrowing money and ending up deeper in debt in the long run.
This year, CPS managed to close a $734 million deficit. The major way that CPS is able to close that shortfall is by cutting spending in various areas as trying to raise money or revenue is too unreliable. This leaves schools with the budgets for things deemed non-essential cut.
“We’ve seen in the last year, a cut affecting DL [Diverse Learners] staff, janitorial staff, maintenance staff, I mean, even material stuff, like the paper towel shortage, is sort of well known,” said social sciences teacher Timothy Hopps. These cuts target many resources available to schools and can mean less services for students.
“We used to get a lot of federal funding around what they call ‘out of school time’ money, OST,” said Assistant Principal Dr. Sarah Hanly. “And for the last several years, we’ve received, I don’t know, upwards, I’ll say $200K plus for out of school time money. And we use that money to pay for club sponsors, to pay for ACT prep, just lots of things where we can kind of provide outside of school time programming for students. And this year, they cut that down dramatically to about a quarter of what we got.”
One major reason for this was the pandemic, which put a strain on all services, but schools were given some money as they came out of the pandemic to help with the transition.
“Well, I think the federal funding that was sent a long time ago was really to deal with like getting students reengaged, right?” Hanly said. “You guys have been so isolated, and so they were really trying to come up with programs to get you all back into buildings, back into extracurricular activities and whatnot, and wanted to make sure that the schools were funded for that.”
Now, a lot of that extra funding has been drying up, along with national and state decisions about funding allocations that are bringing less and less money to CPS.
Hanly explained that this means that they cannot pay club sponsors for their time, and programs like ACT prep classes are likely possible, but they cannot do everything.
With all of these cuts and impacts, there is much anxiety around the future among staff and students.
Vannessa Donnelly, a senior, spoke about these fears. “Especially my friends that are, like, really interested in art because, some programs that are the first to go on budget cuts are the art programs because they’re seen as less important than like science programs or math programs,” Donnelly said. “So definitely my friends that are really into art and theater. They’re scared that their programs are going to be cut.”
According to WTTW, the Chicago Board of Education said they are prioritizing keeping cuts “out of the classroom” as much as they can.
“One [anxiety] is, like, people’s jobs, you don’t know what’s happening especially around the end of the year, last year, and then over the summer, as people try to navigate like their jobs,” Hopps said. “But I think in addition to that, from a student’s perspective, especially among our DL students, knowing whether or not those services are going to be available or if they’re going to have access to the staff and resources that they need.”
According to WBEZ, earlier this year CPS cut 500 custodian jobs and cut about 250 special education teachers and 673 aides last spring.
It is still uncertain if more cuts are coming and how they will affect Lane in the coming years.
