Southwest Life

State Sen. James Meeks is encouraging Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students in some of the city's poor areas to skip the first day of class Sept. 2 and instead attempt to enroll in an affluent north suburban district.

Meeks said he expects thousands of students to spend the day at New Trier Township High School in Winnetka. Protest organizers support the move, saying that it will highlight the longstanding debate about how public schools are funded in Illinois.

The system currently allows for funding of local schools largely from local property taxes, but critics says that it simply allows for better funding in more affluent neighborhoods.

Chicago Public Schools - the third largest school district in the nation with more than 408,000 students - allocates about $10,000 annually to each student, compared to $17,000 annually spent in the New Trier district.

"Today we are back to two-tiered schools -- white and affluent on one side, and black, brown and poor on the other," said Meeks, a black minister.

Yet CPS statistics show that neither truancy nor low test scores plague area schools:

At Kellogg Elementary, where 33.8% of students come from low-income families, daily attendance is 96.3%. Additionally, 84.3% of students meet or exceed state standards on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) - and the city average is just 64.1%.

Nearby, students at Vanderpoel Elementary (48.4% of whom are low-income) attend class more than any other area school, except Keller Regional Gifted School, and 85.8% of Vanderpoel students meet or exceed state ISAT standards.

Similarly at the high school level, more than 57% of Morgan Park's students are low-income, but they score much higher than their peers citywide at the Prairie State Achievement Exam (PSAE). More than half of MPHS students meet or exceed PSAE state standards, although the districtwide average is just 29.3%.

At the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, 50.4% meet or exceed PSAE standards - and more than 42% come from low-income families.

So what do you think: Should state lawmakers take another look at how school districts are funded?