‘Make all the lemonade’: Covering Chicago’s mass school closing

What it was like, what I learned, and how I’d do it differently today. 

By Lauren FitzPatrick, Chicago Sun Times

The latest in our new series on covering school closings. 

More than 10 years ago, when Chicago closed a historic 50 schools at once, I was only months into my first big-city, uber-political beat covering Chicago Public Schools. I was newly assigned to the education beat, promoted from the suburbs to assist my paper’s veteran ed reporter ahead of an epic teachers strike.
 
Scrambling to learn the basics of schools reporting, I was trying to keep Chicago Sun-Times readers informed during a juggernaut that would impact thousands of lives. I had zero insider sources. I was also pregnant with my first child.
 
I shake my head today at all I managed. The Sun-Times’ archives show my byline on about 200 stories from November 2012 when the closing process kicked off and late October 2013, when I birthed a son and tapped out for a few months. Apparently, I was keeping up with “normal” education stories, too — Catholic and charter school stuff, legislative updates, and kids traveling to D.C. for the presidential inauguration.

I was newly assigned to the education beat. I had zero insider sources. I was also pregnant with my first child.

Last year, a handful of us from the new Sun-Times + WBEZ public radio merger decided we would take a hard look at what had happened and how things had panned out since then.

Three members of the squad had been on the beat in 2013, so the reporting began by mining our own clips, old files, and emails for data and promises.

We rummaged through basements and garages looking for notebooks with names and numbers of people who’d pleaded for their schools to be saved.

What we found was stark: promises were not kept, benefits for kids did not pan out, and many neighborhoods were hardly transformed but instead saddled with vacant school buildings.

What we found was stark: promises were not kept, benefits for kids did not pan out, and many neighborhoods were saddled with vacant school buildings.

Looking back at what had come of the mass school closings in Chicago as the investigative reporter I am now made me think about how we could better tackle any future rounds of closings.

How’d we do?

The Sun-Times paper and website were one-stop shops for families and school staffers wanting to keep up on key developments, and we did this part really well.

The mayor’s office was ultimately driving the bus on the closings, so our City Hall reporter was a key partner in keeping up with breaking news and publishing scoops. We kept families and the public informed.

We did a handful of enterprise stories, too, featuring real people who’d be affected when their kids had to change schools. Thanks to a super curious data reporter who ran a demographic analysis of the proposed closing list, we pointed out a racial bias resulting from the city’s choice of schools to shut down.

We also poked holes in one of the key promises that every kid whose school closed would get sent to a better school, in one case using state standardized testing data to make our case citywide, and in another sussing out examples of where CPS’ school boundary changes would shortchange kids.

I was good at listening to families’ complaints and concerns about kids’ safety, and I turned them into stories. Plus, I grew a human. So, generally I’m proud of the work we did.

I was, however, learning the beat as this thing was happening, learning the language and who the players were and the very basics of it all. Skimming back through those clips, that shows. 

I see I spent a lot of time responding to what was happening and explaining that. If I had to do this again as the more knowledgeable reporter I am now — or even who I became within just a few years of 2013 — I would spend much more of my time enterprising and debunking and getting ahead of official rhetoric. We’d have a fact-checking feature online for sure. I’d have filed FOIAs for communications among key players, something I didn’t yet know was a thing.

Given a chance to do it over, I’d question the underlying claims of literally everything that officials told parents, including the qualifications of the closings’ architect, Barbara Byrd-Bennett. DID Chicago really lose 100,000 kids as the city claimed? WAS that actually the problem, or how did CPS’ own policies lead to the mismatch between kids and buildings? WAS a formula of 30 kids per class a sage way to consider utilization? 

Luckily, I wasn’t doing this alone. At the Sun-Times, the data reporter, the City Hall reporter, and our ed-minded editorial board writer all contributed to the whole picture. There were education teams at other media outlets also covering the story.

I was good at listening to families’ complaints and concerns about kids’ safety, and I turned them into stories. 

A different journalist now
 
When the closing process began, CPS bosses and the mayor’s office regularly offered me “beat sweeteners” — an exclusive with the former Marine chosen to oversee the transitions, heads up on other kinds of embargoed announcements, that sort of thing. Those offers promptly dried up. 
 
The administration was prone to overselling, promising the moon to families while attempting to cut the facilities budget, chopping off some of the most expensive old buildings so the school system could stretch the little money it had. Eventually I caught on to this theme, and it became the first thing I looked for in every announcement made — what was too good to be true? I then wrote accordingly. 
 
Our 10-year anniversary package shows how much I’ve grown as a reporter, not just in education matters. I’m more confident, harder to bamboozle, fluent in how systems work and who the players are, and properly sourced.
 
I’ve done a bunch of work on things you wouldn’t think are related to schools — like properties and taxes, new expertise that let me easily dig into what happened to the empty buildings. Board of education reports didn’t fully show what happened to them, so we had to go to the county to trace the ones that sold — and point out the ones the board announced as done deals but hadn’t actually closed on and ones that resold, too. I’ve also done deeper background checks on candidates and political officials in the years since, so I knew how else to scrub the new owners and potential new owners far beyond a company name.
 
Readers have learned to trust me during all these years because of the track record I’ve built.

What I would have done differently

Looking back, I would have done more data-based reporting to poke more holes in the arguments that were being made.

I would have scrubbed Byrd-Bennett harder, too, since she was the one trusted to lead the process. I only learned later how little time she actually lived in Chicago and how obnoxious CPS officials were to make us all call her “Dr.” when that degree was honorary. She was, as it turned out, not entirely trustworthy.

I’d have looked harder at the outside money backing the closings as well.

If I’d had my feet under me better, I might also have gone outside of Chicago and talked to folks who’d gone through closings in other places to show how difficult they are to pull off successfully and what kinds of major supports they need to be successful.

I’d have done a story about the Black history being lost when schools named for cool inventors and artists and doctors were closed.

I’d have pushed the Sun-Times as a news org to enlist community folks to photograph their “failing” schools and building conditions. I’d have lobbied for a fact-checking bug or feature.

If I hadn’t been gone for so much of the 2013-2014 school year, I might have made a bigger stink about the kids whom CPS lost track of, especially kids without permanent homes.

Questions to ask about school closing proposals:
 
How did we get here?
The argument in Chicago was that, for the money available, there was too much space in schools and not enough kids.
 
Is this being done systemically?
Chicago’s prior mayors had proudly cut ribbons on lots of new schools as the population plateaued and then began to fall. There was no citywide master plan to pinpoint and prioritize where Chicago needed more classrooms and where it had too many, and so decisions to build new schools or new annexes often felt like political favors rather than holistic planning.
 
Who is being impacted?
Kids, families, teachers, and the taxpayers who are paying for folly or for efficiency. In this order, too. But don’t forget the neighbors who chose to live near a school and will live with empty buildings or new development that likely will be privately owned. We saw empty school buildings sell to private owners who then did a terrible job of keeping them up.
 
Does the stated rationale hold true?
Chicago used a “utilization” formula that placed 30 kids in a classroom and ignored other useful purposes for space, such as peace rooms and space dedicated for parent volunteers or counselors. Research shows 30 is hardly the kind of small class size that best benefits kids. The school district also claimed a $1 billion budget deficit.
 
What’s going on behind the scenes?
In Chicago, the brand-new CEO, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, had closed schools elsewhere, commuted to Chicago from her Ohio home throughout this entire process, and eventually went to federal prison following a separate criminal bribery scandal. In July 2013, a month after the schools shut down, Chicago upended the way it budgeted money to schools and the schools CEO quietly pushed through the Board of Ed a giant no-bid contract that ultimately landed her in prison.
 
Whose money is influencing the process or policy?
A pro-charter foundation funded community hearings as charters were eager to fill the empty buildings. Big business leaders were in the mayor’s ear — as emails to him years later revealed. And the Chicago Teachers Union also was funding and conducting research.
 
Who stands to profit? Which costs are quietly changing?
Closing schools comes with costs — logistics of moving kids, storing stuff, and securing buildings — so we documented each time the contract over those logistics went up. WBEZ did a great story about the one pastor who spoke in favor of closing schools — and then landed a sweetheart deal on one of the empty school buildings that continues to make money. During talk of consolidating four small high schools a few years later, I scrubbed the “community support” in favor of the closings and found questionable ties.
 
What’s supposed to happen, and what’s the soundness of those plans?
Don’t forget to keep track of these promises in case they change during the process. I could have kept better track of these, pointing out when the promises of saving money dried up. Schools now have closed all over the country, so there is plenty of research available on benefits and the drawbacks.

Schools now have closed all over the country, so there is plenty of research available on benefits and the drawbacks.

Things to keep in mind

The intentions of the leaders are not the same as the outcomes of their decisions. No one is setting out to harm special education students or poor kids or kids of a particular race. No one is setting out to saddle neighborhoods with problems by adding vacant buildings. But Black students overwhelmingly bore the brunt of the churn.  And without a systematic plan for their reuse and significant public investment, market forces likely will continue to ignore neighborhoods that they’ve been ignoring.

There’s plenty for everyone to eat at this buffet. Clearly there will be news your readers will need to know, so you’ll have to stay on top of stuff parents will have to do during this process, and you might have to scramble to recover news-you-can-use type scoops. But otherwise there are so many angles to cover and characters to follow, so focus your enterprise reporting on what you find fascinating or essential.

A decade ago, WBEZ questioned the math of claims that CPS “lost” 100,000 kids from the school system. The Chicago Tribune chose one school community and dug in deep to show what life looked like there. The education magazine Catalyst Chicago tracked some of the kids that left Chicago — or got lost — after the closings. Our editorial page got in on the story, too.

Make all the lemonade. If school officials are balking at letting you inside, think about the impact you can make from the outside. We couldn’t get the access we wanted to spend time inside schools on the chopping block (outside of highly supervised events), so we pivoted to another pressing concern: the safety of moving thousands of kids to new schools. We found guides from three school communities to show and tell: a parent who’d spoken at a hearing, a longtime school volunteer, and a neighboring pastor. We asked them to lead us along the paths that the school district laid out and the paths kids would actually take. We tallied vacant buildings, photographed what looked like drug deals, counted up broken bottles and drug vials and chatted with neighbors. Later, I looked along the paths the district set for sex offenders — asking the district why it was advising kids to walk past such houses.

Remember what you already have. So much schools data is already online and downloadable. We took an early version of the list of schools to close and ran the demographics which showed how Black families were overwhelmingly impacted by the proposed closures. This clearly struck a nerve with the mayor (who owed his victory to Black voters) as he pushed back harder against this story than any other I’d written to date. State data also helped us assess the quality of the schools to which kids were being reassigned and showed different results from the message the school district was selling.

The closings don’t end when the schools shut down. There are so many ways a closed school impacts its community. Keep looking back, especially when officials just want to move on. There surely will be unintended consequences that will pop up. Is your district making any plans that belie the promises from closing schools? Chicago, of course, kept adding new schools and annexes in the years following 2013.

Keep your eyes open for those little moments that reveal big truths. Chicago talked a lot of game about seeking community input during its closing process, which officials earnestly referred to as a “Comprehensive Community Engagement Process Around School Actions.” A few hundred forums and community meetings were held, including legally mandated formal hearings with an outside attorney for each school on the chopping block. Families complained it all felt phony, “a done deal,” a “rubber stamp.”

Two moments bubble up as bookends to this reality.

At one of the first community meetings on the South Side one Saturday, each speaker was limited to two minutes. When a middle schooler started to sob while advocating for her school, the bureaucrats recording the feedback and keeping the time cut her off right at the limit.

And then when the day came for the Board of Education’s vote to confirm the 50 proposed closures, board chambers were packed with folks making a last-ditch effort to plead their cases.

Instead of listing the names of the doomed elementary schools, board members took a single group vote on the bulk of the closings, resorting to a “parliamentary maneuver to speed the process along” as I wrote then.

“History was made in Chicago Wednesday in about 90 seconds,” read my lede from May 2013, “but most of the folks who witnessed firsthand the death of a record 50 Chicago Public Schools didn’t even realize it.”

Lauren FitzPatrick is an investigative reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times. You can read her stories here. You can follow and find her on social media here.

Previously from The Grade
Closings are coming. Cover them well. (Tim Daly)
What really happened in Chicago? (Steve Rhodes) 
When good news goes missing (Karin Chenoweth) 
Another Look at Schools Coverage In Chicago (Evan F. Moore)