Chicago closing 54 schools in face of $1 billion deficit

Charles Rex Arbogast / AP

Parents protest outside the home of Chicago Board of Education President David Vitale on Thursday, March 21. The school district said it was closing more than 50 schools to cut costs.

By M. Alex Johnson, staff writer, NBC News

Crushed by a $1 billion education budget deficit, Chicago is closing 54 public schools, school district officials announced Thursday.

The official list of closings isn't due to be published until March 31, but parents were learning whether their schools were on the list in letters that were already being sent home with students.

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The school district's chief executive, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, said the district is 20 percent under capacity ? almost 100,000 students ? ?leaving many schools half-empty. The district will save $500 million to $800 million for each school that is closed, she has said in community forums and news interviews leading up to Thursday's announcement.

"We've got at least two decades of decay, of children not being able to receive the kind of education that they should," Byrd-Bennett told NBC 5 of Chicago.

Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, which has been protesting the coming cuts for weeks, said the closings would mean "utter chaos."

"This city cannot destroy that many schools," Lewis said in a statement. "These actions will put our students' safety and academics at risk and will further destabilize our neighborhoods."

Lewis blamed Mayor Rahm Emanuel for the schools' disarray, calling him "the murder mayor."

"He is murdering public services (and) murdering our ability to maintain public sector jobs, and now he has set his sights on our public schools," she said.

"But we have news for him: We don't intend to die. This is not Detroit."

The union has scheduled a citywide save-the-schools rally for Wednesday.

Emanuel said in a statement from Utah, where he is on vacation, that Chicago couldn't afford to put off difficult decisions any longer.

"This problem is not unique to Chicago and like (other) school systems where enrollment has dropped, we must make tough choices," he said. "Consolidating schools is the best way to make sure every student is in a safe and better performing school and that all of our students get the resources they need to learn and succeed."

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