Chicago is home to the emptiest big-city school in the nation
Just 27 students are enrolled at Frederick Douglass Academy, which was built to serve more than 1,000 kids.
Frederick Douglass learned to read in secret.
He understood from a young age that literacy was, in his words, “the pathway from slavery to freedom.”
But at Frederick Douglass Academy High School in Chicago, the school is so under-enrolled that Illinois cannot publicly report how many of its students read proficiently. There simply aren’t enough tested students to publish the results without risking their anonymity.1
Douglass Academy has 47 classrooms built to serve 1,008 kids. But only 27 students are enrolled there.
At 3% utilization, it is the emptiest big-city school in the country, according to Chicago Policy Center research.2
Meanwhile, CPS personnel records show Douglass currently employs 28 full-time staff members.3
In a district that once served nearly 600,000 studentsand now serves 312,000, and where one-third of school buildings sit at least half empty, Douglass illustrates the consequences of poor facilities planning: fewer opportunities for students and higher costs for taxpayers.
If a student in Illinois misses more than 10% of school days in a year, they are considered chronically absent. At Douglass, 100% of seniors are chronically absent.
And while the state couldn’t report test scores for the most recent school year, not a single 11th-grade student at Douglass could read or perform math at grade level in the 2023-2024 school year.
This isn’t due to underfunding. In the 2023-24 school year, Douglass spent $93,000 per student.
The real issue is simple: Research has long shown that very small high schools struggle to provide the breadth of academic courses and extracurricular opportunities available at larger schools.
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