Decisions about Jones are a long way off

06/10/2009 10:00 PM


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A new Jones College Prep high school building won’t be ready for occupancy until the 2012-13 school year. That’s what Jose Alvarez, Chicago Public Schools director of operations, told members of the Jones local school council, parents and community members on Monday.

Should Alvarez’s three-year design and construction timeline hold, this year’s incoming freshmen might get to study in the new school.

Alvarez said the new school would most likely hold 1,200 students. And CPS was considering two options for enrollment in the new building, Alvarez told Chicago Journal in a brief interview.

One option would keep the selective enrollment process in place. The second would mix students taken in by selective enrollment with kids from the neighborhood.

Decisions such as where the new Jones would draw an attendance boundary for the South Loop, should the school allow neighborhood kids, won’t be made for some time.

The Jones LSC, which has held a series of extra meetings to discuss the possibility of building an expanded facility on the cleared land south of the current school structure in Printers Row, unanimously approved a nonbinding resolution at the meeting that made the following points: that Jones maintain its academic program and social justice bent; that Jones remain a “premier, downtown, selective enrollment” high school; that the number of South Loop students allowed in a new Jones be capped at 300; and that CPS offer “respect and understanding relative to ‘just’ use of TIF resources.”

The resolution calls for the school’s Targeted Recruitment Support program to be kept. The program reaches out to leaders in neighborhoods underrepresented at Jones and encourages qualified students to apply.

The LSC announced last fall that CPS was considering building a $130 million new high school on the parcels north of State and Polk, land where the Pacific Garden Mission was headquartered for decades. The school district had planned a gymnasium project on the site for years. Tax increment financing dollars could be used to build the new structure.

“It’s entirely up to CPS to make the final determination as what’s to be done,” said Jones principal Joseph Powers, when discussing the resolution.


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