Last I looked, Chicago’s public schools were so broke that Mayor Emanuel had to close 50 of them, fire hundreds of teachers, and slash budgets so deeply that in some cases funding disappeared for librarians, chess teams, and even toilet paper.
Well, when you put it that way . . .
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I love lil’ Lincoln! It’s a great, high-scoring school filled with wonderful children and caring parents. And I know it’s overcrowded. At the moment, there are more than 800 students attending a school whose ideal enrollment is 630.
So in a perfect world I would wholeheartedly endorse allocating the money Lincoln needs so that it doesn’t have to convert its art room, band room, auditorium, and gym into classrooms—as even more overcrowded schools on the southwest and northwest sides have had to do.
For starters, Lincoln has a gifted program and a special French program that together add more than 100 kids to the enrollment. So room could be freed up at Lincoln by moving these programs to an underutilized north-side school—and there are plenty of good ones right in the area.
The LaSalle solution was dead within days.
Alderman Smith proposed that an addition to Lincoln be built on the hospital site, thus giving wary residents a reason to support McCaffery’s deal, or at least not strenuously oppose it.
