Lots of people have ideas about how to handle overcrowding at South Loop Elementary School.

Move students to the under-enrolled National Teacher’s Academy. Put students at the current Jones College Prep building.

But the decision that South Loop Elementary Principal Tara Shelton announced in a letter to parents on Nov. 4 was to eliminate the school’s entire regional gifted center program.

Some parents lamented that the Chicago Public Schools central office makes these decisions, sometimes with little community interaction.

“There’s been nothing but committee meetings, parental involvement, community involvement,” said Sharona Elsey, parent of a South Loop elementary student, speaking at the Nov. 9 monthly Local School Council meeting. “But it’s a CPS bureaucrat’s decision that has nothing to do with the best interests of our school.”

That line was met with applause, as were a few other parent attacks on CPS.

CPS responded to questions to this article with a statement that suggests the elimination of the regional gifted program is not absolutely final.

“We are in the middle of analyzing the needs of every community and developing a citywide strategy for our portfolio of schools,” wrote CPS spokesman Frank Shuftan. “Once we have gathered all of the citywide information, we will revisit the decision to ensure that it is consistent with the long term plans of CPS.”

CPS is supposed to announce in December a district-wide plan to deal with school spacing issues.

At the LSC meeting, Shelton repeated what she wrote to parents: After discussion with CPS officials, South Loop Elementary would extend their plan to phase out the regional gifted kindergarten program by no longer accepting any gifted program applicants for any grade.

“Since 2009 we’ve had three different CEO’s [Chief Education Officers] and I’ve had three different direct bosses,” she said, alluding to the tenures of Ron Huberman, Terry Mazany, and current CPS head Jean-Claude Brizard.

“A final decision had to be made in consultation with CPS,” she said. “They thought, or I thought, that this would be least disruptive to our families.”

Shelton declined to take any questions from Chicago Journal, so it’s unclear how much say she had in winding down the gifted program. At the Oct. 5 LSC meeting, Shelton had insisted that only the kindergarten gifted class would be eliminated.

Fioretti’s office had no say, according to the alderman’s education liaison Leslie Recht, even though they’ve worked with CPS for three years on overcrowding.

“CPS was always like, ‘We could go another year [before confronting] overcrowding,’” Recht said in an interview. “And then they called us and told us it was decided with no consultation or discussion.”

Recht added that she is hopeful CPS might reconsider their decision.

Shelton and Recht had previously explored housing students at the National Teacher’s Academy. An eleventh-hour agreement had almost been reached in 2009 to move some students to NTA.

While South Loop elementary is over-enrolled — with 37 students in some classrooms, according to parents and Recht — NTA has had plenty of vacant space since demolition of the nearby Harold Ickes Homes.

The Academy of Urban School Leadership, a CPS contractor, currently manages NTA. AUSL’s mission is to turn around low-performing schools.

“There has been a lot of discussion about NTA, which is under-subscribed,” Shelton said at the meeting. “But AUSL may not see this as their mission to solve our overcrowding problem.”

Recht said that she had “definitely gotten the message from CPS that they weren’t interested in combining the two schools.”

NTA Principal Amy Rome said in an interview that she has not had any discussions in the last few months with CPS or South Loop Elementary about bringing South Loop kids to NTA.

Another vetoed idea was moving students to the current Jones College Prep building, at 600 S. State St. when the new Jones opens at 700 S. State St.

Shelton downplayed the possibility at the meeting, citing reports that CPS and the city’s public building commission want to tear down the current Jones in 2013 and replace it with a park and straightened street.

Fioretti’s office, though, is still fighting to bring students over to Jones. The alderman wrote a letter to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, dated Nov. 11, asking CPS to consider placing 7th and 8th grade South Loop Elementary students in the existing Jones building starting in the 2013-14 school year.

Recht sees hope that CPS might revise its plans to eliminate the entire regional gifted center, because the Emanuel/Brizard administration is still getting its bearings.

“We have to look at what’s going to work best on an ongoing basis,” Recht said. “We haven’t given up.”

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By JP
Posted: 11/30/2011 10:10 PM

there goes the NTA option. Instead of serving the community whose TIF dollars built it, they will bus students from Price in from four miles away. What a wasted opportunity.

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By Educator from South Loop
Posted: 11/20/2011 10:41 AM

Eric really shows how little he knows about the problem. Fioretti has been nothing but a champion for South Loop. The enemy is Shelton who has caused the overcrowding by allowing her unqualified, unprepared, undisciplined out of boundary people to come to South Loop and dumb down the curriculum. Lets see if her people will raise as much money as the other parents did. I doubt it--all they do is take free lunch, free school supplies and free after school programs.

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By Anonymous
Posted: 11/17/2011 9:28 AM

There is no way I would allow my child to sit in a classroom with 37 kids. At some point, the parents have to stop waiting on CPS to solve their problems. I would simply complete an Options application for another nearby school that isn't overcrowded - like NTA - so my child could benefit from a decent class size. Once South Loop figured something out, maybe I'd send my kid back. In the meantime, I would not make my kid suffer through this bureaucratic mess.

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By C from Wicker Park
Posted: 11/17/2011 8:54 AM

Two errors in your piece: The housing project torn down adjacent to NTA was the Harold Ickes and AUSL is the Academy for Urban School Leadership. Just FYI

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By Eric
Posted: 11/17/2011 1:13 AM

Sounds like nothing but a bunch of talk and hot air on both sides, something I have become accustomed to. Talk, Talk, Talk, Talk,...yet nothing is done in any growth perspective. Thank you Principle Shelton and ald Fioretti for nothing.