Chicago public school is 97 percent empty

“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,” notes Austin Berg of the Chicago Policy Center. It has more staff than students and more classrooms than students:

Frederick 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…Meanwhile, CPS personnel records show Douglass currently employs 28 full-time staff members.

In a district that once served nearly 600,000 students and 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….

At Douglass, 100% of seniors are chronically absent….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.

Chicago’s left-wing mayor, Brandon Johnson, has sought to get rid of high-achieving high-schools in the name of “equity.”

Thousands of Chicago school laptops have been stolen and ended up in China, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.

Chicago is under investigation for illegal anti-white discrimination.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has advocated race-based reparations, which would backfire and harm the economy, as well as unlawfully discriminating based on race.

Conservative public-interest law firms have sued Chicago over its illegal racial discrimination, such as a lawsuit brought by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.