Making Sense of the Chicago Public Schools' Budget Deficit

Rebecca Vevea & Crystal Yednak:

When the Chicago Board of Education meets Wednesday to vote on a scheduled 4 percent raise for teachers, one figure will be crucial to the debate: The $724 million deficit the Emanuel administration says Chicago Public Schools is facing for the upcoming year.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard have repeatedly cited the almost $720 million deficit, and Emanuel mentioned it again Monday when he called on the state to give CPS the roughly $300 million it is owed in back payments. But a Chicago News Cooperative review of the district's funding sources shows that the calculations are inconsistent and CPS's actual deficit is still unclear.

There is no question CPS is in a large financial hole. The extent of the deficit, however, depends primarily on how much federal stimulus money the district has available and whether late payments from the state are taken into account.

CPS has come to rely on hundreds of millions of dollars in federal stimulus funds, which are drying up. In the administration's most recent budget presentation, in March, officials said CPS will have exhausted $260 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and $104 million from the federal Education Jobs Fund.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at June 15, 2011 1:09 AM
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