Shrieks of laughter rang through the crowded blacktop of McCormick Elementary School in Little Village, echoing off the walls of the century-old building back to the students making the noise. Amid kids with sports equipment and staff monitoring the playground, adults stood scattered throughout the area, playing “Ring Around the Rosie” with children and helping to tie shoes.

Known as parent student advocates, these adults are members of the community — often parents or guardians — brought in to help students with social and emotional growth through Chicago Public Schools’ Sustainable Community School program. The program incorporates community voices into the structure of neighborhood schools, including education and programming.

For students transitioning into being away from parents all day, the parent student advocates offer a friendly and familiar face outside of the classroom. Many of the parent student advocates worked with McCormick students since it was designated a Sustainable Community School in 2018, including as parent mentors.

That’s how parent Marta Elizondo got involved two years ago, she said. When the chance to be a parent student advocate came up, she jumped on it.

“Since I’ve started here, I’ve loved being with the kids,” Elizondo said in Spanish. “I didn’t think about this opportunity twice, because the truth is, I really like the kids. This is something that I love.”

What are Sustainable Community Schools?

CPS schools with the Sustainable Community School designation incorporate the voices of local organizations and nonprofits alongside school leadership, parents, educators and other community members. Together, they make joint decisions about the curriculum, culture, after-school programs and more.

The district established 20 of these schools in 2018, and 16 more schools, from the South and West sides, joined the roster earlier this month, each with a price tag of $500,000. It’s put a spotlight on the schools as CPS and city officials along with the Chicago Board of Education, disagree on how to address the district’s $734 million budget deficit.

Additionally, the collaborative nature of the program enables organizations to provide support such as health and wellness services, trauma-informed care, and restorative justice practices, according to CPS. It also offers educational and work opportunities for parents in the community, including classes in English and life skills.

The inclusion of more schools offers students a strong education in their neighborhood and turns institutions into local “community hubs” that offer support, Mayor Brandon Johnson said at an Aug. 4 press event.

Marta Elizondo, a parent student advocate, talks to a first-grader while she plays during recess at McCormick Elementary School in Little Village on Aug. 21, 2025. (Eileen T. Meslar/Chicago Tribune)

“It is well past time that the community actually gets to dictate what the community needs … because each and every community knows exactly what they need, they know what their school community should look like and can look like, so they get to drive the outcomes themselves,” Johnson said.

Proponents: Taking ‘Hunger Games’ out of selective enrollment

Sustainable Community Schools emerged from an effort to save Dyett High School for the Arts in Washington Park from closure in 2015, a measure that ultimately succeeded following a 34-day hunger strike by community members.

Board of Education member Aaron “Jitu” Brown, an activist who developed the Sustainable Community Schools model, said these measures were and are still necessary to ensure equal educational opportunities for students while keeping the community that supports the school involved.

“If communities are actually deeply ingrained in how a sustainable community school village looks, then you will have … higher parent and community involvement, better attendance and ultimately better performance,” Brown said.

As a graduate of CPS, Brown said he saw firsthand what happens when students leave neighborhood schools to attend others.  It can change the academic results of the school, he said.

“If you’re pulling the top performers out of neighborhood schools, now you can say these schools are failing schools because, you know, six children can make a complete difference in how a school looks academically,” Brown said.

“Disinvestment doesn’t (work),” Brown said. “Investment does, and especially investment guided by community wisdom.”

The expansion of the program is a step toward all district schools receiving more resources enabling them to become high-quality institutions, according to Monique Redeaux-Smith, a CPS parent and current teacher-on-leave working with the Illinois Federation of Teachers and CTU.

“They (students) don’t have to leave their communities in order to get that world-class education,” she said.

Formerly an eighth grade teacher, Redeaux-Smith recalled how defeated the selective enrollment high school admissions process could be for students who did not have the test scores to get into their preferred school.  “Test score release day was ‘horrible’ and ‘solemn,’” she said.

“It was heart-wrenching to think that children just couldn’t go to the school in their neighborhood, and families and students be happy with that choice, that there’s this Hunger Games of ‘I have to try to get into this school or to that school,’” Redeaux-Smith said.

Chicago’s systematic inequity and inequality made the Sustainable Community Schools model necessary, she said.

While the burden of balancing budgets has historically impacted Black children, according to Redeaux-Smith, the Sustainable Community School model intends to heal it.

“This is a model that is very intentionally fighting against that and saying, ‘We will not balance budgets. We will not burden our generation of Black and brown young people with the same things that we burdened past generations with. We are going to do what is necessary for them. We are going to provide equity,’” Redeaux-Smith said.

More sustainable schools as CPS tackles financial troubles

The new school designations follow years of conversations about the program’s place in the district.

The Board of Education named the Sustainable Community Schools as a strategic priority in its 2023 five-year plan. The recently ratified CTU contract also included the creation and funding of more Sustainable Community Schools, with each school receiving $500,000 annually.

The additions come as CPS seeks solutions for its $734 million budget deficit and attempts to present a balanced budget and approve it by Friday. The district proposed a balanced budget earlier this month, but it was criticized by some board members for not including borrowing, a repayment to the city for the pensions of nonteaching district staff and a dependence on tax increment funding CPS has not yet secured.

The district has already cut over a thousand positions to save money, including custodians, special education workers, teachers, central office employees and crossing guards along with services such as after-school hot lunches in an effort to reduce costs and balance the budget.

CTU aims to expand beyond 36 Sustainable Community Schools, with the ratified contract including plans for the designation and implementation of at least 70 schools by the 2027-28 academic year. The 16 newly designated schools are scattered across the city and join the 20 Sustainable Community Schools designated in 2018 when the program began.

Schools are considered based on a hardship index that takes into account criteria such as the number of low-income and homeless students, followed by an application process.

The new schools designated for the 2025-26 school year are primarily located on the South and West sides. The original 20 Sustainable Community Schools were also primarily on the South and West sides.

CPS blames the deficit on several factors, including historic pension obligations, past accrued debt, increasing costs of maintaining CPS buildings, and the rising needs for required services for students with disabilities. The district has considered one-time loans and further reducing school programs or staffing to reduce the deficit.

Board and CTU members, along with the mayor have repeatedly called on state legislators to help fund CPS and minimize the deficit. While the state House Executive Committee held a legislative hearing on CPS funding and discussed the budget deficit, no funding for the district was drawn up or passed. Johnson promised to do “whatever is necessary” to ensure that every family in the city has access to Sustainable Community Schools.

“It’s easy to make investments when there’s billions of dollars coming from the federal government,” Johnson said at the press event. “It’s even more difficult, though, when we don’t have it, and it is even more critical to prioritize these investments when we’re facing real fiscal challenges.”

Critics appreciate the idea but worry about the cost

Families say the Sustainable Community Schools model is helpful and wanted in communities, according to Hal Woods, chief of policy at education nonprofit Kids First Chicago. However, he also knows parents expressed concerns in the past about the process for choosing the organizations that work directly with schools.

“We’re not against the program, but I think we want to make sure that parents and families and students have a choice in terms of selecting who the partner is,” Woods said.

Opponents’ questions about the timing of the new schools — raised at the Aug. 4 event — are fair given the budget crisis, Woods said. With each SCS expected to receive $500,000, that is a $8 million expansion — roughly the cost of two elementary school budgets or 80 teachers, he said.

“But, you know, in the same way that CPS has laid off 480 custodians … it’s a fair question for the board to consider (of) where should we be prioritizing our investments right now,” Woods said.

Woods referenced a 2021 report by the American Institutes for Research that found only two out of the 20 inaugural schools saw continuous improvements in academics, attendance, and disciplinary incidents, though the time period also overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic, a CPS teachers strike, and racial justice movements across the U.S. Other schools saw improvements in some areas, but not all simultaneously.

Nelson Gerew, chief public affairs officer at the Chicago Public Education Fund, a nonprofit that aims to provide educational equity by supporting teachers and staff, said the program also previously drew concern because of the associated costs. However, the extra resources the school model provides often works well with those neighborhood institutions, he said.

“I do know that kind of where they’re most successful is when there’s a strong alignment among the principal and school community,” Gerew said. “But that’s true for any school intervention, in any sort of school improvement.”

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/08/27/chicago-sustainable-community-schools/