CPS is counting on hundreds of positions going unfilled to balance its budget

Carrie Glaspie was worried when her grandson told her that his seventh grade teacher had left and he was spending hours working at a computer.

The school was not able to replace the teacher through the school year. The class became so easy that her grandson never had homework. Then, when the school told her he was way behind grade level, Glaspie was irate.

“The children are not getting the education they are supposed to get,” Glaspie said. “So instead of being set up to go for their dreams, they are being set up to be under grade.”

Glaspie said unfilled vacancies at schools like the West Side elementary her grandson attends are harming children. That’s why she’s highly suspicious of Chicago Public Schools’ plan to save money in the upcoming school year by leaving hundreds of positions unfilled.

Faced with a budget deficit of more than $500 million, the school district is counting on vacancies to provide $220 million in savings in the spending plan being voted on Thursday. The district says it calculated these savings by looking at natural attrition, turnover, and the time it takes to hire and staff positions.

For Glaspie, this raises big questions. Her grandson attends Lewis Elementary School in Austin, a school with 97% low income students.

“I want to know are these savings coming at the expense of our kids’ education?” she said. “We want them to be transparent about how they are handling these vacancies. What are the options for schools like ours? it’s important for everyone to know, especially the parents and the community because the decisions they are making now are affecting our kids’ learning environment.”

Glaspie is one of 30 Local School Council members who signed a letter asking CPS to formally explain how they plan to handle vacancies. It is one of several questions they have about the budget that the Board of Education will consider on Thursday. The letter was organized by KidsFirst, an organization that promotes parent advocacy.

The Chicago Teachers Union also is incredulous about the idea of using vacant positions to provide massive savings. Pavlyn Jankov, head researcher for the CTU, said it is contradictory for CPS officials to say they are “advancing a balanced budget when it requires them to hold positions vacant.” He said the plan incentivizes school leaders to delay hiring.

CPS: “Working around the clock” to hire

In 2017 in the midst of yet-another budget crisis, CPS quietly included vacancy savings in its spending plan. That year the district budgeted for $76 million in negative expenditures on unfilled positions. Every year since then vacancy savings have been in the budget, slowly getting bigger until this year when it shot up by $70 million.

But Ben Felton, CPS chief of talent, is emphatic that the school district wants people in these positions. He said they have not and do not plan to put off hiring to save money.

“I wish that they could see how hard my team is working to fill every single position,” he said. “There’s never been any suggestion from the CEO, from the board or from anyone else that we shouldn’t fill positions. We’re working round the clock to do it. It’s why we’re investing so much money and time.”

Felton lists the many initiatives the district has to find staff, including an in-house teacher residency. The school district also has a program that hires teachers who want to work in low income communities before they have a school and matches them with jobs.

Yet the school district is confronting reality: the demand for new staff in recent years has outpaced the supply of candidates, Felton said.

Flush with $2.8 billion in federal COVID relief money, the historically understaffed district opened up 9,100 new positions between 2019 and 2024, including more than 2,500 teachers and 3,500 support staff. Even as the COVID money runs out, CPS is still planning on opening 800-plus new positions this year–a move that some fiscal watch dogs are criticizing.

At the same time CPS was adding positions, a nationwide teacher shortage set in.

The end result: In December of this year, the vacancy rate for regular teachers was 5% and for special education teachers it was 7%. But there were still 1,000 more teachers in the schools than in 2019. The same pattern— high vacancy rates but still more staff overall— held for other positions, such as teacher aides, social workers and counselors.

CPS CEO Pedro Martinez and his board of education have defended using COVID relief money to add positions. He said the federal money brought staffing levels closer to where they should be. Even with so many new teachers, most classes in CPS are bigger than state standards.

Counselor and social worker ratios also are now closer to recommended levels set by national standards, but not where they should be for a district of mostly poor students.

Unfilled vacancies harm students of color

Vacancies hurt schools with mostly Black and Latino students in low income communities far more than schools in more affluent neighborhoods. In schools with more than 76% low income students, 5% of teacher positions were vacant in December of 2023; in those where less than a half of students were low income only 1% were vacant.

Mykela Collins said her son had a long term sub in 1st grade because the school struggled to find a teacher. His school, Manierre Elementary started last school year with four open teacher positions. Two were filled by December, but the other two stayed open all year, according to employee rosters.

Collins has some ideas about why schools like Manierre have a particularly hard time attracting teachers. Manierre is in Old Town on the near North Side, but unlike nearby elementaries that serve the children of affluent families, most of Manierre’s student live directly across the street in the Marshall Field Garden Apartments, a 10-building complex of subsidized housing.

“My guess could be maybe the neighborhood or the type of kids we serve… Manierre is a predominantly African American school,” she said. “And there may be some issues with the behavior or some teachers just don’t want to come this far.”

While her son’s class did ok with the sub, she said students lose out when there are not enough teachers or other staff.

“Because if you have a second or third grade classroom, and you only have one teacher, but you have about 40 students, there is no way one teacher can control, and successfully teach those students day in and day out,” Collins said..

One complication is that this year CPS changed the way it allocated money to schools. Rather than dole out pots of money, as it did in the past, this year CPS provided positions to schools. This means that some schools could have open positions, and then get additional positions that they still can’t fill. In the past, principals facing this reality could decide to spend the money on something else, like educational software.

Collins is on the Local School Council at Manierre and said the school doesn’t have money for a financial education after school program. She would like the school to be able to use the money allocated for vacant positions on that program instead.

CPS said it is still working on guidance around liquidating unfilled positions.

Special education teachers and aides are in particular short supply. In December of 2023, 7% of positions were open. These positions are created in response to student individual education plans, so they are required by law.

Chemistry teacher Nabil Jaffer told the board of education last week he could definitely see the effect of unfilled positions. Englewood STEM, a neighborhood high school, was missing three special education teachers all year.

Jaffer admits it was a struggle trying to teach chemistry in a large class with many students having special needs and without the co-teacher he was supposed to have.

“I pride myself on my ability to meet students where they are and adjust my content delivery methods,” he said. “But with 26 students in the class and a third of them having IEPs, students were not able to demonstrate mastery on even the most fundamental tasks.”

The unfilled positions that CPS is banking on to help balance its budget contribute to the scientific literacy gap and lessens the chances students will be able to graduate high school and handle college work, he said.

Sarah Karp covers education for WBEZ. Follow her on Twitter @WBEZeducation and @sskedreporter.