This is a housing blog and not a CPS blog (there are some excellent ones out there, by the way) but often our chatter does turn to the neighborhood school near the property.
We have discussed how some north side elementary schools are being turned around by parents who are “stuck” in their homes (can’t sell because they’re underwater) and therefore are looking at local school options and by lovers of the city lifestyle who simply want to raise their children away from the “soulless” suburbs (your word, not mine.)
As some of you linked to yesterday, the Chicago Tribune recently discussed the growth in CPS enrollment in some north and northwest side neighborhoods.
Student attendance in the northern stretch of the city climbed 2.4 percent during the last two years from 121,897 to 124,836 students in 2010-11, according to district enrollment records. The growth, while slight, came as attendance slipped in every other city zone — the West, Southwest, South and Far South sides.
Some of it may be by choice (wanting to remain in the city) and some of it might be due to the housing bust.
Claire Wapole grew up riding city buses to school and studying in city classrooms, where she took creative writing and even dissected a shark.
But multimillion-dollar deficits and the academic inequities in Chicago Public Schools had her agonizing over the choice she and her husband had made to raise their own children in the city.
When her son turned 5, she toured private schools but cringed at the expense. She tried to enroll him in one of Chicago’s top public magnet schools, but “he wasn’t reading ‘War and Peace’ so he didn’t get in,” she said with a laugh. So the couple selected a neighborhood school on a hunch that a new principal and committed parents would spur improvement.
Come Labor Day, Amy Smolensky will enroll her children for another year at Burley Elementary School. On Monday, with an eye to the upcoming year, she and her husband, Dan, coaxed their second- and third-grade sons to write in their summer journals for a few minutes.
Smolensky volunteers with the parent group, fundraises for the Lakeview school known for its literature and technology programs and volunteers with Raise Your Hand, a coalition of CPS parents.
Still, the to-stay-or-to-leave-Chicago question remains a perennial conversation topic among her friends, one fueled by every budget cut, unpopular district policy or competitive turn in the admissions required for the city’s top schools. Many parents now eye high school and the long odds of acceptance to a selective enrollment school as the new pressure point that could drive them from Chicago.
“I feel like we are here to stay … yet it’s a roller-coaster ride,” Smolensky said. “It’s a constant struggle.”
Many of those in the article live in neighborhood school districts.
The question we most often chatter about is: while some of the elementary schools are decent, what about high school?
For all the talk about getting a kid into an Ivy League college or other selective college, it seems it is even a greater feat to get into one of Chicago’s selective high schools.
While she likes the grade school, Wapole already worries about high school even though her oldest child is only 10.
CPS students submitted 63,267 applications for entry to the city’s nine selective enrollment high schools for the coming school year, district records show. Of those, 8 percent — or 5,196 — were accepted. Northside College Prep High School, one of the state’s top schools by any measure, accepted 296 of the 7,419 applications submitted.
“In the city, there’s this anxiety of at 13 or 14, where is my kid going to go? … That’s the part where I look enviously at my suburban sisters,” Wapole said.
Grade schools were no different. Acceptance rates to Chicago’s magnet grade schools spanned 21 percent to 2 percent for the coming school year, according to district records. In kindergarten, competition was worse.
Drummond Montessori Elementary School, for instance, received 703 applications for three available spots in kindergarten this fall. Because the public school’s Montessori program begins in preschool, most spots fill and make the competition for kindergarten seats more difficult. Drummond received 400 applications for 36 spots in the preschool program for 3-year-olds, district records show.
Recent changes to the admissions rules further fray parents’ nerves.
Many, however, are simply throwing in the towel.
Brandy Isaac thought she’d stay in Chicago when she and her husband bought a duplex in the city’s Southport Corridor in 2004. They liked the neighborhood school and the magnet school down the road.
“We thought this would buy us seven years. Then we would probably go to the suburbs,” Isaac recalled.
But deterred by the magnet admissions process, intrigued by anecdotes from friends in the suburbs and lured by the idea of a lawn where her kids could play, Isaac spent a year researching different towns and school systems that might suit her family. They settled on Glenview and enrolled their oldest child in kindergarten at Lyon Elementary School last fall.
“It still is emotional, but there’s no remorse. That went away quickly,” Isaac said. “We joke about when the kids are off to college, we may move back to the city.”
Will the Catholic Schools or other private schools become the choice for many parents?
“We think what we’re seeing is more families who may have bought a one- or two-bedroom condo with the intent to be there for a limited number of years. … Those families are staying longer,” said Ryan Blackburn, a spokesman for archdiocese schools.
Surrounded by brick bungalows and towering trees, St Matthias Transfiguration Elementary School sits in the city’s Lincoln Square neighborhood. The school’s enrollment ballooned 92 percent during the last seven years to reach 332 students registered for fall, according to school officials.
St. Matthias Pastor John Sanaghan said he sees more young families in the church pews as well. Last year, Sanaghan said he baptized eight children for every funeral held at the church, whereas the church recorded 1.5 baptisms for every funeral in 2000.
“I looked out my window one day last spring and there was a traffic jam of baby buggies,” Sanaghan said. “It’s like a town square.”
Will the housing bust have the unexpected result of actually leading to an improvement in the Chicago Public Schools?
More families sticking with city and private schools on the North and Northwest sides [Chicago Tribune, Tara Malone, July 19, 2011]
