us this evening i would like to say a special word of thanks to sullivan high school for hosting this conversation  and their lovely but sweltering auditorium which is a good indication that we've got some funding issues at an old boiler i'd also like to thank all of the volunteers who helped make this evening possible  i am going to stick i'm a member of network forty ninth's education committee and we have been talking about funding and education for quite some time and one of the things that we decided as a funding subcommittee was that we really needed to have a broader conversation both to educate ourselves and to engage our neighbors in a conversation about what the real funding issues are who's responsible for what elements of funding from the state level to the district down to the local schools so that we could really begin to hold people accountable for the areas of their responsibility and try to fact systemic change we know that the schools in rogers park are doing some amazing work but we also know that they face a number of challenges and have experienced a number of funding  cuts that were accelerated in the past several years and we believe that the funding issues are significant but solvable and that's why we are excited to bring together a panel of people panel of spurts who can help us figure out how to frame questions and demands of our elected officials so that we can really move forward and as long term change  before we start i want to say a word about network forty nine it is a progressive community led political organization committed to organizing and advocating for policies and elected leadership that advance a high quality of community life benefiting all residents in the forty ninth ward of the city of chicago and focusing on areas such as housing community safety balanced development and of course education so as i said we are very pleased to be joined by a panel of experts this evening and i will briefly introduce all three of them and then i will hand it over to them for some presentations and then what we'll do is have a question and answer session so you should have received some note cards when you signed in as questions come up and they undoubtedly will during the presentations and during the evening please jot those questions down and we have some room hosts who can pick those up for you so just hold up your hand in between presenters and we will pick those up from you can our room host stand up so people know who you are so great so just raise a card if you have a question and they'll be happy to pick it up for you one other bit of housekeeping as i said we are grateful to sullivan for hosting us this evening we will be wrapping up promptly at eight thirty and in order to allow the folks who have been here all day to start to make their way home we would appreciate your help in moving  moving towards the exits in the building when we close down we will have some information for you some flyers on the way out be sure to pass pick those up when you pass by the table that you signed in on and thanks for coming so tonight we are joined by three people who have both long standing and very unique views of education funding on different levels and by that i mean at the state level the district level and the local school level we are very we are very pleased is that better thank you to be joined by ralph marr cheery who is the executive director of the center for tax and budget accountability if you have never heard him talk about school funding in illinois before you are in for an evening of amazing enlightenment i first heard him speak about fifteen years ago and although the problems were framed slightly differently i am thrilled that he is helping people still understand how funding works in illinois more also happy and i should also say he is has just arrived from springfield so we're particularly grateful that he made the trip here instead of home we're also pleased to be joined by jenny beggs who is the communications director for raise your hand as many of you know raise your hand has been one of the premier voices in parent advocacy in chicago they have also done an amazing job of analyzing the district budget within hours of its release which is always amazingly in process of but they have been a real source of inspiration both in their activism and also their analysis so we are appreciative of having having you take the time to join us as well and finally we are joined by joanna sue we are grateful to have her join us as a representative of the gail community academy joanna has been on the local school council there for years  first as a community member and now as a parent and she has seen the school level budget evolve over years and also seen firsthand the real impact of the shift from centrally central budgeting to school based budgeting or student based budgeting so we are grateful to have her firsthand view of  ready good evening and we're all smarter and executive director of the bipartisan center for tax and budget accountability we're not technically nonpartisan we're bipartisan that means my board of directors actually doesn't like or trust each other at all and it's fantastic for us the staff because it lets us focus on best practices and data so things have changed in illinois in a very big way i mean when we all went to bed thirty first thirtieth really we went to bed in a state that actually had the worst school funding formula in america and by worst i mean the one that was the least equitable by every objective standard and one  funded k twelve education by the time we went to bed the following evening we went to bed in the state that had the best form real stuff funded yet but the actual formula that we have is going to work if we fund it by definition equitably and it's going to ensure that every school district across the state has adequate resources to meet the needs of the kids it educates so what changed we used to be like thirty six other states a foundation formula stayed right where the state of illinois would peg a foundation level amount of school funding per kid and that would be the amount per kid state wide and then some combination of state and local resources funded our foundation level was based on nothing not one actual joked of cost of educating children not surprisingly nothing is not the strongest predicate for education funding so in the late ninety's governor edgar's said hey i want to have an idea of what we should have this foundation level picked to so we appointed a fab the education funding advisory board they recommendation for what that foundation level should be based on the cost of a very specific educational standard what would it cost per kid to buy an education is sufficient quality to get two thirds of the nine at risk children passing our state's tests that was our aspiration think about that as an aspiration it's two thirds of the nine at risk kids so it throws one third of them out the window apparently we don't care if they can pass and it doesn't count any at risk kids so you know at risk term of our education policy it means at risk of academic failure three children hit that when they walk in the door low income special needs and english language learners so apparently all i up until the evidence based model didn't aspire to educate its at risk kids even though that was a pretty tight nero standard right only getting to two thirds of the children in the state  reasonable likelihood of academic success passing the state's test we never funded it in fact in twenty seventeen last fiscal year our state school funding in total was four billion dollars less than what happened suggested four billion that's amazing when the evidence based model passed it completely changed this foundation approach no longer now going forward will the states some capricious arbitrary number of per kid funding instead the model identify the resources financial resources every individual district in the state of illinois a needs based on its unique student population to implement those evidence based practice is which over time have demonstrated they actually enhance student achievement and across the board so not just on test scores they increase graduation rates they drop they reduce dropout rates they increase college attendance rates they increase college graduation rates in other words all those metrics that you really want those outcomes metrics you really want from a k twelve system the evidence based model funds so there are twenty seven of these research or evidence based elements built right into the statute state board of education has read it to be thirty four elements whatever there's twenty seven but if israel wants to call it thirty four for their ease let's call it thirty four and these practices include a lot of things that just make common sense right so it's smaller class size for k through three of course you need a smaller class size for k through three it funds dead it funds high quality teachers and funds high quality tier two interventional funds after hours programs that funs programs that are enrichment in nature but we all know have a statistically meaningful correlation to enhancing student achievement so let me give you an idea of how it works so you're going to pick out a middle school district as i know those the best i mean the president of a school board that elementary and middle school district so say you have a middle school under the evidence based model it says are right for every one hundred forty two kids enrolled in your middle school there's the first big change from the old formula by the way it's based on  da you have to create your school budget based on the number of kids and the number of kids who actually bother to show up by the way so it's a nice positive change there but for every one hundred forty two children enrolled in your school evidence based model says you need one full time equivalent teacher for every course subject so it funds that then it says for every one hundred twenty five low income children you need a nother full time equivalent teacher in every course subject and low income child counts twice once in your general and once again as a low income kid for every one hundred twenty five english language learners you need a nother full time equal teacher in every course subject and if the kid happens to be low income that child counts three times so you can see what the formula does it takes these evidence based practices class intervention  as professional development nurses guidance counselors psychologists based on your school districts unique student population including its demographics it says here is the resources this district will need to implement these twenty seven evidence based practice is so that over time it's the children attending that district have a reasonable likelihood of academic success they certainly will have the type of educational opportunity that will allow them to succeed as opposed to what we did in the past so that's a big change so every school district gets a unique a unique what's called adequacy target the amount of resources it needs that's the first part of the formula now where you don't have it fully funded this may surprise no one but when the state board of education ran the numbers what they found was based on the evidence today school funding levels in illinois are seven point four billion dollars short of what the evidence indicates is needed and is a great credit by the way they requested an increase for this coming year they said state do we know let's put the money i thought i thought that that was a very rational thing to do a number of commentators have said i am them for asking for this huge increase in school funding it literally doubles what the state puts in but the bottom is it's the most rational request they could make it's based entirely on the research in the evidence of what works and since we know that should we fund it interesting thing we're not gonna know right away so they are going to put three hundred  fifty million dollars in new funding into the evidence base model this year and it looks like they're talking about putting a similar amount of new money in next year so this is the only money this three hundred fifty million that is going to be distributed through the evidence based model how do you make sure that distribution goes to the schools that need it most and what do you do about prior funding that school districts received well prior funding part we took care of was something called the base funding now this is going to create a little bit of a challenge for people tracking expenses because included within their right are things like some old categorical funding for special education that's still special education money you still have to use that at the school district level for special education purposes you still have to account for that but that resources wrapped into your base funding minimum so that the state can't take it away what that really did was made it absolutely ironclad that shifting from our old flawed foundation formula to this new evidence based model would not create a winner and loser school districts because the print out politics of that would kill any education funding reform right because legislators don't ask is it a good policy proposal to go how does my school district do it if their school district loses money there are no vote no matter how good the legislation is this took all that silly nonsense off the board plus if you think about it in a state that is seven point four billion dollars short of adequate as its starting point let's not take resources away from schools preexisting resources so that's the base funding minim the second part of what's expected to go in a k twelve funding is some local resources now this is not a surprise to everyone illinois is currently the most reliant state on local resources to fund k twelve education we rely more on property taxes than any other state in america however you do have to have property taxes form a portion of your school funding what that what the evidence based model does for this element it's called the local capacity target is it looks at the every school district in the state of illinois and it puts them on a continuum based on where you are in the continuum you're expected to put in a certain amount of school funding so those school districts with very high levels of e a v are expected to put in a lot where i live or are forced we are expected to put in a lot and communities in let's say east st louis area and they're expected to put in significantly less because they have lower evey's that's the second element so when you add those two elements together your base funding minimum what you got from the state and your local capacity what you rationally should be expected to put into the school funding that creates a dollar amount of current resources available between your local resources and what the state gave you last year to fund education we divide that dollar amount by your adequacy target the amount you should have to see how close to adequate you are you have seventy percent of the resources you need eighty ninety sixty and based on that this percentage of adequacy every school district in the state of illinois it was put into one of fourteen years tier one school districts are furthest away from adequacy they have sixty four percent of the resources the evidence indicates they need or less here to school districts have between sixty for in ninety percent of the resources here three between ninety and one hundred a year for little river forest one hundred percent or more so the new money now the three hundred fifty million is going to be distributed among these teachers as follows half of it goes to tier one half a hundred seventy five million of the three hundred fifty million goes to those districts that are the next forty nine percent of the new money goes to tier one interior to pro rata so tier one gets another bite at the apple so now ninety nine percent of this new money have gone to districts that are below ninety percent of adequate nine tenths of one percent of the new money goes between ninety and one hundred percent funded and one tenth of one percent of the new money goes to the river force of the world now why is the cut off ninety percent of adequacy for you know really not getting much new money at all as opposed to one hundred percent and the answer is simple the model is only considering state and local resources available to a school district it is not looking at federal federals not in the formula so the federal government funds anywhere between eight and eleven percent of the cost of education every year so if you're at ninety percent of what the evidence indicates you need in your resources between your state and local medics you're pretty close to one hundred percent and we really wanted to focus the distribution of new resources that based funding minimum is not tied to twenty seventeen it moves up every year so whatever you get from the state of illinois in the first year of the evidence based model gets added into your old base funding minimum and becomes your new base funding minimum and twenty one thousand we built in a fail safe to stop the state from cutting preexisting funding levels to schools those are the basic elements of the model as you can tell is a very different approach to school funding than we've ever had before now if you're curious about yes in the initial rounds and i haven't seen the final rounds on you know if you've seen the final rounds for implement all these evidence based practice is for every school and that's clear you may have heard that the legislation constituted a bailout of the city of chicago and really that rhetoric was not only an adequate  accurate i would say it was veiled racism honestly and it was used as politics to play mostly white conservative areas of the state of illinois against the city of chicago and frankly against their own economic interests if they were low to middle income communities and the reason i say that is we've actually looked at how would numbers were intended to go now i say haven't seen the final sole be some minor adjustments and c p s and sub getting roughly twenty percent of the new money under the distribution in the new formula that evidence base three fifty they get about seventy million they have twenty percent of the kids were the disproportionate share going to c p s and seeing it when you compare c p s is poverty profile and the number of kids they educate so educates are about three hundred sixty seven thousand kids attend c p s schools and the poverty profiles roughly the low income house roughly eighty five percent of those children are low income and you compare that to lumping together all the school districts across the as a combination educate over three hundred thousand kids and you look at their percentage of poverty you find something very interesting c p s ends up getting the same amount as school districts across the state that educate roughly three hundred twenty thousand kids a less than c p s but have a poverty profile somewhere between forty five and sixty percent low income so they have less concentration of poverty and fewer kids but they get the same amount of money as c p s why would that be the local capacity target c p s unlike other communities for the most part that have high concentrations of low income children it is expected to contribute some money to the formula and it should be it's a rational thing to do when you're creating a statewide funding formula but c p s has unique concerns and particularly its unique concerns with its pension were very well accounted for in the new formula so the first thing you did and this isn't news to anyone in the room i don't think it's for the first time the state's actually going to pay the normal cost contribution to the chicago teachers pension fund that's two hundred  twenty million dollars so two hundred twenty million dollars c p s used to have to take out of it's property taxes to fund their pension contributions just the normal cost part of it no longer has to think about that another way that frees up two hundred twenty million c p s already has and it's based funding to use not for its own pension cost but to put in a classroom that's over and above the seventy million that's coming in that's that's a nice addition now it's not just normal cost that is the cost of funding the benefit that's the pension cost and seat in c p s i mean as you all know the chicago teachers pension fund i think you all know was  hundred percent funded in the year two thousand and mayor daley and c p s decided to put zero dollars in for a decade creates an unfunded liability long enough in ten years is really pretty long enough now the systems are just about fifty four percent funded meaning there's a huge legacy cost funded liability has to be paid in addition to the normal cost if the only issue with the chicago teachers pension fund was covering the normal cost first of all it's a very low normal crossed and it's very easily covered in extend resources the charge to c p s for engaging in this irresponsible fiscal practice for a decade this year is going to be roughly four hundred ninety million so let's call it five hundred million just to use a round number ok what the model does is it says look that five hundred million you have to pay there's no way out of it and the only place you're going to be able to pay it from c p s is your property taxes so that five hundred million dollars reduces s is local capacity target we understand the c p s can't spend the same tax dollar twice once to pay its pension obligation and wants to educate its children so what we tried to do was creat funding formula that i don't know crazily enough reflected reality so we tried to isolate only the property wealth of resources actually had available to it to fund the classroom so that's a long and short way of saying the new formula by design will be equitable and distribution and adequate amount we just got to get it funded so the challenge is in a state like illinois are you generating adequate state based resources to get the state to kick in the seven billion dollars you know sooner rather than later and you really you wouldn't want to put it all in one year so we did make that request if you think about it a system can only rationally absorb so much of a new investment up front it needs some time to plan for you have to do hiring you have to do a facilities analysis right you have to deal with labor markets and availability and pipelines and all that stuff so a better approach is actually phasing in that seven billion fully inflation adjusted over a three to five year period and probably five is better because it's a substantial amount of new money each year and districts can plan thoughtfully over a five year cycle to take that money and incorporate it and use it but we don't have i mean the state of illinois right now in reality has a deficit of north of sixteen billion dollars in a general fund that only spends about twenty seven billion on services so that's a challenge now they did borrow six billion of pay some of that backlog and bills the accumulated deficit will only look like it's ten billion it's actually the six so the state needs to raise some new resources but i think it's really going to be easier political path to put pressure on the general assembly and whomever the governor is to raise those resources now that we've passed the evidence based model because we can say something now as advocates for education we could never say before we know what it costs to educate our children and you're not putting it in this isn't all about the poor starving kids this is about what the research says is needed to fund an educational system that meets the educational needs of the children it serves and by meeting their needs we're saying putting in those practices that have been shown to improve student achievement over time now what you want out of an education system so i don't want to hear that every governor or the education legislator the education anything unless you're willing to talk about raising the revenue we need to fund our schools to what the evidence indicates is required different argument in it the second thing that's really neat about the evidence based model we were having a little side bar about this but it creates an advocacy tool for parents stakeholders why do i say that the statute lays out what the evidence based practices are you can now look at how your school your school district is spending its resources and see if it's allocating them the way the research indicates actually enhances student achievement this you know it might be a challenge given contract scenarios to move around based funding minimum the old money into these new evidence based categories right but as the new money comes in i want at least my school district is talking about how do we apply o money to maximize the effect is what the research indicates works to move student achievement you know that we know the effect size for these practices some of the most powerful things school districts can do with money because you can't put all these things in place at once the states not funding the full evidence based model you have to pick and choose low cost high outcomes come from high end but it is evidence based professional development for teachers tear to  interventional let's get them on board let's start there that's a way to build the capacity of the system but anyway it's a very radical change the evidence based on how we fund education but it's a really really good one it's literally the best practice now any state has on its books and it's up to advocates to make sure it gets funded thank you hey everyone my name is johnny big i am a c p s mom of three before i was a mom i was a high school science teacher in the south suburbs and now i am the communications director for raise your hand which is a citywide parents organization we advocate for high quality education for every child and it's a lot of work thank you for your hand started in twenty times i actually dug up a cool picture on our facebook page from the first really slash press conference on april twenty second two thousand and ten these children are now eight years older than they are in the picture so a bunch of parents were really gushing on facebook about it  in twenty times the state threatened to cut one point three billion dollars from education in illinois and c p s then threaten to increase class sizes to thirty seven and it obviously set off alarms in every parent's head and i'm sure every educators had as well and parents basically became mobilized around this like how can we stop this from happening and also on top of all of this c p s was running a deficit so we had both the state and the city which seems to be a common theme in our work is we have two different levers we're always trying to push to try to get more funding from both sources a we also push on s as well but we'll get to that a little bit later but raise your hand was able to mobilize parents across the city to send twenty thousand e mails to legislators which is pretty remarkable which is an online petition and did that these budget cuts that illinois was threatening and also at the local level raise your hand conducted the first ever to surplus campaign and actually mayor daley released ninety million dollars to c and then the budget cuts got started so our work was cut out for us at this point in twenty turn the state and c p s agreed on a pension holiday which mentioned and there were no real revenue solutions founder maybe it's better to say and acted they were not enacted any revenue solutions and we trudged along for seven years while c p s made budget cut after budget cut to our schools  budget cuts that when we say budget cuts the big ones mainly happen between twenty thirteen and twenty seventeen over on my slide here i have twenty sixteen we had a billion dollar bake sale down at the thompson center by about  hundred plus parents showed up some with baked goods myself and you know we got a lot of press we marched around we had cool pictures selling crook easy and i think i had to cookies and what you know we were all mad because our schools are getting budget cuts but it was a way to bring attention to the issue and we had parents actively making phone calls while out there we weren't just out there yelling we had people making phone calls with these scripts and you see we were hitting the mayor the governor and speaker mike madigan meanwhile while these budget cuts were happening there were other things happening which were impacting our budgets new schools the deficit and asked b b otherwise known as student based budgeting or per pupil budgeting so c p s as you know close dozens of schools if you don't know c p s has also opened dozens of schools during that same time student enrollment has been declining i was trying to find some numbers last night and i found that in the past two years we've lost twenty one thousand students c p s was running deficits every year between twenty thirteen and twenty seventeen in the amounts of four hundred million to one billion depending on the air and depending on what the talking point at that time it seemed in some cases student based budgeting it also began during this time it's also known as per pupil budgeting basically there's a dollar amount placed on every child that is unrolled  school at the twentieth day of the twentieth day is that's your moment that's your student base budgeting for all you people out there are people who are going to run for l s e in your local school budget that's line one fifteen  what student based budgeting did was it definitely decreased the amount of money our schools received but it also placed the emphasis on things that were being cut well that was a school's decision that was a local decision you  given the money you at the principal analyse level you decide how to spend it so you cut their program not meet c p s that's you the school deciding that so it really that's when you started to hear that kind of language and it was kind of designed that way and yet that's what we still have and are still dealing with today yeah i think i'm done with this one students in chicago that's going to reduce your ass b b funding because you're only getting dollar amounts for each student what happens when you have less money you're going to have less programming you're going to have less teachers you're going to have just less of everything what happens come the next school year you might lose more students because well the enrollment is declining but also a parent might be like you don't have art oh i can go somewhere else and look for art and then you have more reduced student based budgeting and then you lose more programs and stuff so it's kind of this vicious cycle now please also keep in mind this is not the only funding that c has but this is a big portion of the funding that alice sees receives and this is what they have to deal with when they get their budgets and we can see how this can be a very vicious in harming schools long term district schools continue to get cut we've analyzed budgets and we have found that in the last five years district schools have lost four hundred million dollars  in the same time period charter budgets have increased by two hundred ninety million and the district now spends about six hundred sixty eight million dollars on charters c p s in the past two years has made mid year cuts so i think it was like february of a couple of years in a row one year they reduce the student base budgeting amount mid year and then they've also done things like frozen discretionary funds and that obviously harms schools and harms the made year which can also have other effects like loss of staff loss of programming etc c has reduced the s p b amount over time as well and that has caused obviously another budget cut in kind of a sneaky way so the bottom line the la this is an info graphic that we put together and twenty sixteen we have many parallel and tears that apparently love to get into the budget books and try to decipher it all which is really valuable because we can parents come to us from individual schools telling us about losses of programming our staff and c p s to not to believe any one and then but if we can collectively put it together sometimes there's a force there and also it could alert other parents to try to go into a school and find out what's happening maybe they're not that in tune but then they're like hey i saw that we're like the librarians are gone do we still have a librarian so this was from twenty sixteen there's five hundred just run schools and s at the time there were one hundred fifty seven librarians just put out some data in september and they say that now there's one hundred thirty nine librarians two hundred fifty two elementary school music teachers to ninety eight elementary school arts teachers to sixty five guidance counselors three hundred seventy six health service positions i kind of imagine it could be even lower now because like i said this is from two thousand and sixteen but it gives you an idea of  the cuts in relation to how many schools there actually are and you can kind of think about how that impacts schools my son's school i had to go up there one day to see the nurse and the nurse told me he is in three schools and that's pretty common and so my son happened to be injured on the day the nurse was there which was nice but you know that doesn't this is the happen every day  clinicians this is an infant graphically put together in twenty seventeen about wraparound services you can see some numbers here are really troubling and we also have some ratios up there as well full time school nurses three hundred two i'm going to guess that that's down know that there's a nursing storage period in c p s and i think there are struggling to get nurses in any way for crisis intervention and in the entire district we live in chicago i mean that is just like that's like a punch in the gut along with all of this i just mentioned also keep in mind if you're a parent you know this in conjunction with all of these cuts school fees are up their way because we have to schools have to find the money somewhere to get supplies and other programming also fund raising and the ability to do it or not is causing greater inequity across the system some schools can raise a few ten thousand twenty thousand dollars some can raise two hundred thousand dollars some can just raise five hundred dollars that's causing an equity across the system as well as all of the se funding difficulties so the new illinois school funding bill we have some lots of good i think ralph probably covered all of this he did but there's also some problems and i think ralph covered most of this is well it needs six billion you said six billion right or did you say seven seven point four i did write that down because i thought i thought it was six zero zero man seven point four billion dollars  tax credit compromise we believe drives a wedge for more privatization i'll talk about that in a minute also the new funding formula as well as the tax credit scholarships and also diverted  more money into charter schools and we've calculated that it's about thirty seven million dollars from c p s district schools into c p s charter  schools tax credits dollar ships otherwise known as neo vouchers we are against the strongly and we were we've been we tried to get ahead of this because we saw maybe it was coming and it wound up coming into this new funding formula they allow dollars they allowed donors to direct their tax dollars to specific private schools and allows corporations to direct their tax dollars to broader support of private education we're big believers and public funds should support the public good which is in fact public education  tax credit programs have been shown in other states to actually grow over the years so once the door opens to them they tend to get larger and scope and size and we are seeing a little bit of that in the legislature there are a couple of bills right now i have them we have them itemized up here they allow a reduction of requirements for private institutions to receive the tax credit scholarship money and there's also another bill that allows donations to reduce evidence based funding by donated amounts so legislators are already trying to play with us a little bit and wider net so we have some great concerns over that my is quick i'm not going to get into tax credit scholarships we do have a fact sheet on our website so i would direct you if you're curious about what they are to go read this because it's not very easy to understand and also you know google it and read some more about it and it's it's worth getting to know because it's going to impact our budgets when the state actually meet the commitment to fund schools at the new levels if it's not mandated like we said they need seven point four billion dollars rahner it looks like he has committed three hundred fifty million dollars in his budget which ralph mentioned in his budget the runner did advocate for rolling back the state paying for the c p s normal costs of the pension and so that's something we need to watch because that would i guess that would cost us about three hundred million dollars if that happens ok two hundred twenty eight million this year so that's something that we need to watch we also think there might be some concerns there's more evidence that legislators are concerned that they're not actually going to find this money and there was there was a bill written by senator byrd teano toronto and in her bill which actually passed a committee a few weeks ago this bill would force legislators to appropriate the minimum funding levels before any dollars go to the tax credit credit scholarships so that's kind of indicating like i don't know that we're going to fully fund this but let's try to protect what we have we've been saying since raise your hand started that we need revenue this is an info graphic from twenty fifteen we stand by many of these things still that some we've probably walked away from but there's many long term solutions like progressive income tax closing corporate loopholes there's also short term solutions like tiffs or plus if you notice on the info graphic again we are always advocating at the state level and we advocate at the city level also in this info graphic and every month at the board of education we are also questioning a lot of the expenditures that c p s has and contracts they commit to so departments they have that seem to be huge and growing we really try to get them to focus on teaching and learning in the classroom and the rest of the stuff we do try to question and  we go and we try and here's my slide about c p s can cut spending so more money is invested in teaching learning that's an actual suggestion box outside of the c e o s office by the way it's kind of cute i assume like a high school primate in a wood working class but i was like i am going to put that up there so they do take suggestions so we are at the board of ed meeting every week every month they could cut nonessential contracts they say they cut central office but i think i was looking this up tonight crane's had an article about how that's kind of not really true sort of catalyst chicago back when catalyst was in business or when it was catalyst it's still the chicago reporter i guess took them over we were at the board meeting last month because c e o jackson said that he was going to get rid of all of the claypool crony contracts but we haven't seen any evidence of that yet so we asked did you do it where's the evidence i don't think we got an answer on that exactly and that person followed up with board about office hours to asking about specific contracts and if they had been examined completely also stopping charter expansion and such on roman expansion i would also add that we're big advocates of c p s coming up with a citywide comprehensive community led facilities plan that's transparent so that we know what schools are going to get a new roof for in addition or you know maybe there are no mentors down and we need to talk about how community can what they can do to get kids in their school strengthen their schools etc i was hoping not to cover pensions very much this is our pensions slide i think ralph covered it yeah he did so i'm going to say and we're going to skip that too this is just a little chart we made to demonstrate how over the years the debt service has also gone up as well as the pension costs and i think i just have maybe one more slide what can we do and share knowledge about what's going on share a contact information write letters to your elected officials share our fact sheets or any information we share we do send out an e mail blast you can sign up for those  website visit your elected officials bring a friend talk to them about how budget cuts impact your children give examples of you know the lack of music instruction how you don't have a playground how you know the ceiling is crumbling on your kids whatever it is they did they need to hear that they're the ultimate decision makers and like ralph said this new formula could actually be used as an advocacy tool if we really understand it and use it and that's about all i have to say so thank you very much student pop lation includes not only african americans but also recent african refugees and immigrants also about thirty percent of our students are latino seven percent asian and three percent other and that includes multiracial and arab america seven percent are low income twenty one percent to thirty two percent about a third have limited english proficiency in a gale about ninth at least nineteen languages are spoken with the largest language groups being spanish arabic  that time we have lost about one point five million dollars and so what has spent the impact of that ok with the study last the funny we've lost critical positions like jenny had talked about for example when our librarian retired and our technology teacher moved those positions cannot be replaced so we have to libraries that are building that are now being utilized and though i believe we have a chromebook for every student and we're not totally able to ensure that every student's able to use that technology to their greatest capacity along with the decline in funding back in two thousand and twelve gail was also on the initial to school closure list and i want to thank and on many others in this room for helping mobilize the community and our parents to speak out at the board hearings and other meetings and so they gave yes thank you all the reasons for taking us off the closure list but i mean honestly i'm convinced that with the community support that was really responsible for that and though we were taken off the list we're not close obviously both our teachers their famil really continue to very very nervous about the school's future and that really still continues today it's that part of that cycle that graphic that that johnny had showed earlier and so you know we have lost about one hundred students the last six years and  school year twenty fifteen to sixteen when those data were made available through a chicago tribune article and thanks to betsy for sharing that with me only forty two percent of our students who live within our attendance boundary that year were actually  move up from level two and so really this becomes a racial equity and a social justice issue well despite this we do have you know we obviously have a lot of challenges related to our resources  level school counselor who is a gale alumni so she's from the community who joined the staff this year and we have many many strong community partnerships a few of which i'm highlighting and some of these photos and these next slides here in this photo we've got  lifelines theater who's leading a workshop on and our third grade classroom we have our music teacher miss through us with our students on their way to perform with the chicago children's choir and we we have a greenhouse that's in our building as well and that not everyone else about this next one is the photos from our city year martin luther king day of service this past january which i'm s you i think were also there were really appreciated they brought in about twelve hundred volunteers including about one hundred from northwestern university which has been another strong partner with us and so here you can see just a few of the many projects that they had to beautifier learning fundraiser and so i mean i do think we're on an upswing but it's also a continuing uphill battle it takes a lot of volunteer time staff time and energy to build and maintain th limited number of administrators and staff and parents do a constantly constant juggling act between instruction social emotional learning parents and families like many partners trying to move everything forward in the same direction as it can be a very very difficult so i hope you'll join me in expressing admiration and appreciation to all the dedicated teachers administrators and families out there not only gail but also sullivan and all of our sister public schools in rogers park and beyond so thank you we had talked about passing questions up for a fairly small crowd so i think if you stay on this and projects we can probably hear your question i will repeat it on the mic so that it can be recorded so so i think the question if i may to repeat it so they can be reported to add but correct me if i'm wrong is that in addition to the evidence based funding formula as an advocacy tool what else can we use to push for getting that question to because i'm not a community advocate i'm not an organizer i'm a policy guy but i can tell you from my standpoint this is office and says you like me and all our jobs are grown indiana right now and says that what we've never had before there is a stakeholder community interested in adequately and adequate equitably the education was any sort of metric that we know we're underfunding schools because of this research and it changed the discussion so i want to tell you when we advocated for the model across the state and we were with a bunch of other people in a coalition the initial efforts on equity then work  when the framing changed to be by the way this is what the research indicates is needed for kids to succeed academically year for funding what the research says works right how do you say no to that no i'm against what the evidence is works to educate children it has it changes the discussion and it creates a lot more he says well i think you need to do the same other advocacy stuff you've always done yeah but i think this framing will make all your other efforts far more effective because you can put legislators on the spot with a real simple question do you support doing what the evidence says works we have a school funding model that says here's what the evidence is needed are you against that i against the  other and if the answer to that is no no for what the evidence says well then you're for funding it so i think it changes the discussion i really do think it's different than these other things that have come up down the road just because of the importance of education and the fact that this is tied to the research it did change the debate when we pushed the bill i mean literally the only reason this bill might not have been signed into law was governor  and when he took credit for it in his campaign ads you know those that worked on the legislation were a little taken aback and you mentioned you mentioned credit the tax credit that's what the governor asked for sure jenny do you want to start with that i think you got it up on one of your slides i will try and i'm sorry the question was explained shifts or plus tips tiffs stands for tax increment funding all right totally irresponsible financing but whatever so throughout the city there are various to gesture acts they are supposed to help me with the wording here they're supposed academic i could  economic development is supposed to be for blighted community is to get funding to invest back in their own communities so what happens is and how i really learned about this was i went to the chicago reader and just read a bunch of articles from the past and i just kind of immersed myself in it and tried to figure out what the heck was going on and i also very early on raise your hand had a test for that was probably like twenty ten or twenty eleven i remember going to that and there's other organizations that do the t project will come and talk to a community so there's various ways to find out but basically what happens is you pay your property taxes right if you live in if district when your district in springfield so here's how it to for municipality has its e a v right this is your municipality they say that this area here is blighted we declared a tiff district from that date forward the growth in the value of that he is not taxable by all the taxing authorities the school the municipality etc all that growth goes to fund the development of the community it and they basically get to take the levies every other taxing authorities so your school be your municipality  district levy whatever they add those together come up with a percentage that's the tiff increment finance percentage and they apply that against the growth in value in this community in this area that all that money goes to freezing you what it was twenty three years ago for all the other taxing authorities takes a significant amount of potential books that the other taxing authorities can't reach and then at the end of twenty three years  they get approval from the other taxing authorities to extend it further and i think unless they get that approval any surplus money remaining in the test has to be redistributed back to the other taxing no reporting requirements around this portability of the surplus so it just basically become revenue that should have gone to other taxing authorities that can now be used of the technical surplus so it's it's more like eight hundred fifty nine hundred million now close to call it a billion if you want to get in there yeah but that's a lot of money technically should have the taxing bodies we would i believe c p s would get fifty three percent of that eight hundred fifty million dollars so when we pushed for to surplus we're pushing for hey you've got this surplus money that's basically kind of in the slush fund and why don't you give some of that back to the taxing bodies and it's not just it does not have to go just to c p s it goes to the parks and the fire department etc etc did i answer your question yeah it's i mean it's  short term like infusion of money but it's also good to know how they work and don't work because it's kind of sneaky way to take money from the public the public good and there's also lots of tips just shirks that shouldn't be tipped as tricks they're not blighted and that's michigan avenue is a so the question is how did we get with this student based budgeting for a meal and who was behind it what can we how can we get rid of  ur states have districts that have some student based funding c p s the only one that does it in illinois so i went back last night and looked at a bunch of budget books from c p s so i could try to understand the new city based budgeting would come up because city based budgeting is a huge concern and something we really need to look out more closely and possibly start advocating against and i found it started in two thousand and fourteen when the i'm sorry when i call you out of the audience didn't didn't bring it here it was when it was here and that was the unfunded longer day situation he was talking about student base budgeting and i think it was him who actually piloted it at a few schools and when they piloted it they were the student based budgeting amount was in the six thousand dollars range but when they started it in fiscal year fourteen they actually the base rate was four thousand one hundred forty dollars and three cents so right away like people were concerned like student base budgeting the sound like a really good idea and then when there was this huge difference between the pilot you know supposedly the pilot people were happy with it and i don't know maybe six thousand dollars you you would get a lot more bang for your buck on that one that two thousand more dollars a student so maybe it was like a good amount or maybe you know the people were just saying it was great or maybe the c p s is telling us the people said it was great could be any of the above and that that's and i think i'm sorry all of this is a little it starts coming into your brain and it just kind of all starts flowing together i was trying to make sense of it myself last night so it started just so you know if you want to know it started at forty one forty like i said fiscal year fifteen they actually raised it by two hundred fifty dollars they made a big deal about it in there but budget book if you want to go see it and that will most definitely signed by barbara byrd bennett and then in fiscal year sixteen  i think they kept at the same and then when in fiscal year seventeen they did a mid year cut it went down to forty eight and then it stayed that way the next year and i think it's exactly the same actually they say now it's forty two ninety but that's because of the cost of living salary increases that was why that was the reason why they gave for that i think there was something maybe within  contractors you know they figured out the math that oh we have the student base budgeting and schools have figured out and maybe joe and i can speak to this as analyse member you know it's also it puts the onus on schools on how they make their decisions but some of those decisions are now based on you know if you go to hire a teacher if you have a teacher with five years experience versus someone that's coming in as a first year or even like a ten year experienced teacher i mean that's going to be a solid teacher what are you going to decide given your budget limits you're probably going to take the first year teacher and you know what her teacher might be great and awesome but those are the types of decisions that are are really having to be made that can impact things long  that's an excellent question and it's it's complex because there are so many different issues so many different messages we have but i see what you're saying like there's something very clear here that we need seven point seven point four billion dollars to really fund this i think right there's potentially a clear message ralph recommends over five years maybe that doesn't seem reasonable to a decision maker but maybe it's a reasonable task for us to be consistently saying we need seven point four billion dollars over five years i do see your your your other point though that around like for example librarians like just getting that information to a decision maker can be huge because that could well that's true even your next door neighbor you're right yes yes well there's different organizations also working on different campaigns there is a librarian organization is that you meghan no comment or do you know of that here is that yes every library librarians count there's there's there's different there's different organizations that are targeting different things is one way of looking at it  the we do have community based organizations working together we try to get messaging out i think just really talking to your neighbors attending a local school council meeting to even get the information because it's hard even for us as an organization to get all the information we just hear randomly from people here and there and then it kind of alerts us to oh there must be a problem in this area  and i think talking to your neighbors if there's a if the school has an open house or some type of community event going into that and getting the information i think first it's like we have to get the information and then working with organizations like raise your hand or if you know if you have a particular education issue we do a lot of funding but you know maybe even finding like a librarian to work with you know to help and we all people helping us with our messaging and how how to get that out when you do want to add something i also want to leave you with a few thoughts one is that despite the daunting topic of school funding i think there was a lot of hope in tonight's conversation there's a lot of possibility and there are also some specific things we can do right away we'll see some of those on the board we network forty and i are very pleased to be hosting another event with raise your hand in a couple of weeks and that is a screening of the film backpack full of cash a film that focuses on the impact of charter schools and how they've impacted funding for public education that's going to be at the four hundred theater you can pick up a flyer on your way out we hope to see you there and i hear there's going to be peace at the screen well so please join us for that also if you want to talk to anybody about network forty nine and what we're doing to continue this conversation in rogers park please see someone at the front table and we will have a general membership meeting for a network forty nine on march twenty first we normally meet at a park but since it is the day after the primary we will be meeting at the hartland bar and that's at seven pm and please do not forget that the deadline for c applications is this friday at your local school at three pm there's information about the elysee elections on your way out to pick up a flyer and don't forget to vote in the primary election which is march twentieth but early voting starts at the neighborhood locations this weekend so please take some of the things you learned and put those and