Mary Dixon: A decade ago, Chicago closed 50 public schools all at once. But that depleted already struggling communities and didn't help students, a WBEZ and Chicago Sun-Times investigation found. Then in 2019, the school district tried something different. In exchange for closing fore under enrolled schools a South Side neighborhood was given a new state of the art school. WBEZ's Sarah Karp looks at how the new approach is playing out in Englewood and whether it could be a way forward.

Sarah Karp: In this Instagram real, the first graduates of Englewood STEM High School, the class of 2023, are crowded into the gym singing at the top of their lungs and dancing. It represents the realization of a dream by former school district leaders. Four years ago, then Chicago Public Schools CEO, Janice Jackson, was so proud when she cut the ribbon in the school gym she was close to tears.

Janice Jackson: I'm gonna try to get through this, everybody knows. Every time I talk about Englewood, I start to break down.

Sarah Karp: This was a major change from the past. The closing of 50 schools in 2013 was the climax of two decades of shuttering schools, leaving communities feeling abandoned. Jackson says she felt passionately about addressing the challenge of low enrollment, but she didn't want to repeat past mistakes. She closed four schools and replaced them with this one.

Janice Jackson: For my part, I tried to prove how you can do it in a way that was respectful and also reinvested in the communities.

Sarah Karp: Englewood STEM cost $85 million and is a modern building with airy common spaces and floor to ceiling windows. Freshly minted graduate, Elijah Stiffend, says he visited one of the under enrolled schools that Englewood STEM replaced, and it was broken down and dirty. He says he wouldn't have wanted to go to that school, but felt proud to go to Englewood STEM. 

Elijah Stiffend: They keep everything top notch up in there. You won't see anything out of the ordinary, messed up or anything.

Sarah Karp: Yet a new building is not a panacea. Initially, Englewood STEM attracted a lot more students in the neighborhood that the four schools it replaced. But each year that amount has dropped, and test scores are low. This year, it had half the freshman as it did four years ago. Coach Fabray Collins stands on the edge of the school's track. Collins says it's a nice facility but he misses Robeson, one of the schools Englewood Stem replaced.

Fabray Collins : It hurts when you lose your home. You know, it really hurts. 28 years, right there.

Sarah Karp: In his quiet way Collins pushes against the idea that new is better than the old. The community created in a school, he says, can be more important. CPS CEO Pedro Martinez, echoing Mayor Brandon Johnson, says he understands there are real costs to closing schools. Students, relationships and neighborhoods are damaged. But Martinez and Johnson have other realities to face. Enrollment has plummeted over the past decade. The situation is even worse than it was when 50 schools were closed in 2013, and many buildings are in bad shape.

Pedro Martinez: We have significant issues with our facilities. It's the most stark inequity that I can imagine in the district.

Sarah Karp: Martinez plans later this year to lay out the costs of not just repairing buildings but also modernizing them. The bill could be as much as $10 billion, he says. His predecessor Jackson is usually mum on the school district's direction, but she says Chicago should repeat what was done in Englewood in seven or eight different neighborhoods 

Janice Jackson: What we currently had at that time was not sustainable and nor is what we have right now. I think the only difference now is there's inaction around it and I actually think that that's wrong.

Sarah Karp: Yet each new school costs money and just like in 2013, when 50 under enrolled schools were closed, Chicago is once again short on cash. Like with every alternative to mass school closings, there are downsides. It's now up to Chicago's new mayor to weigh them all, as he looks for a viable path forward. Sarah Karp WBEZ News.

Mary Dixon: Sun-Times reporters Lauren FitzPatrick and Nader Issa contributed to this story. WBEZ’s Lauren Frost mixed it. To learn more about the 50 closed schools investigation go to WBEZ.org/50schools.

WBEZ transcripts are generated by an automatic speech recognition service. We do our best to edit for misspellings and typos, but mistakes do come through.