In imagining our city’s future, there’s one institution at the heart of what happens next: Chicago’s public schools.  

They are where families gather for football games, quiz bowls, yearbook layouts and school photos, report card day, recitals, dances and proms; where the joy of teaching and learning is shared between educators and students and where many of us cast our ballots to vote.  

Schools are not just places of education. They are the anchors of a community, the propellers of our democracy and a centerpiece of city planning for any thriving, safe and welcoming neighborhood — one that is vibrant, walkable and accessible for all.

By 2050, Chicago Public Schools will be a sustainable community school district. But families don’t have to look that far ahead to imagine what can be different or to see it already taking shape.

Last year, the Board of Education passed a five-year plan centered on equity and ratified our union’s four-year contract focused on creating the schools our students deserve. By the end of this year, we will have advanced the Black Student Success Plan, reopened libraries, installed solar panels on four new schools, implemented new sanctuary and LGBTQ+ safe schools protocols, and hired counselors and social workers to provide wraparound services that meet students’ needs in every school, every day.

Our contract enabled the school district to implement mandatory recess for elementary school students; codify smaller class sizes; expand access to honors, arts, music and sports; and establish dual language schools in the Black community on the West and South sides.

In just the next two years, we will have tripled the number of sustainable community schools. 

Unlike a traditional school, sustainable community schools are built in response to past policies of closure and privatization. They trace their roots to Southwest Side mothers who went on a hunger strike in 2001 to create Little Village High School and community activists such as Aisha Wade-Bey and Jitu Brown who went on a monthlong hunger strike in 2015 to stop then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel from closing Dyett High School in Washington Park.

Whereas Emanuel saw a quarter of CPS students as children “who would never amount to anything,” these mothers, families, educators and neighbors saw something different.

They created schools as true community hubs, shaped by the neighborhoods around them and responsive to students and families within them. 

These schools don’t just educate our young people. They reflect and uplift entire communities. They integrate the needs of families and neighbors into the daily life of the school day, creating environments where supports extend far beyond the classroom. 

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This essay is part of a series developed in collaboration with World Business Chicago wherein accomplished authors envision what Chicago could and should look like in 2050.

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Because learning doesn’t happen in isolation, these schools partner with community organizations to provide meals, health care, mental health support and essential services before, during and after school. These wraparound services aren’t add-ons; they’re woven into the fabric of the school, serving the student, their families and the broader community all at once. 

They reflect the understanding, often captured in the proverb, that our city of neighborhoods is a city of villages. When city bureaucrats saw as liabilities schools that had been denied resources, parents saw community anchors. If you tear the anchor up, you unmoor the community. But if you strengthen it, you solidify everything surrounding it as well.

Food deserts, school deserts, health care gaps and more become solvable when the school is not just a building but a center of stability, access and care.

We are creating a city where Black parents no longer have to send their children on commutes twice as long as those of their peers to reach a quality school. Where we do not measure the difference in educational opportunity by which side of Roosevelt Road or Western Avenue a school is located. Where immigrant and Latino parents do not track their children’s location with bated breath because immigration enforcement is a subject for history books, not a daily fear.

We are creating a sustainable community school district where LGBTQ+ students will be safe to find and express themselves among affirming adults. Where each community’s unique knowledge will be invited into the school buildings so that children are shaped in intergenerational wisdom, parents have wraparound support provided by nonprofit partners and the school day is not capped by morning and afternoon bells but by programming that meets the full needs of students and their families.

It’s not difficult to imagine because it is already happening. 

The model of Sustainable Community Schools, which started here in Chicago, has spread to Maryland, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Baltimore, New York City, Austin and elsewhere because education is more successful when it is rooted in loving the children in the classroom as much as the families in the neighborhood and supporting both in finding their personal agency.   

To continue on that path, by 2050, we will have reformed the role of money in politics and ensured a fairer tax system that supports public education. Because if we believe in the power of the village, then we must equip that village with the power to make decisions and create policies without undue influence.

We will have succeeded in the work of making a great society by guaranteeing equal access to a great education. 

The privatization experiment started exactly 25 years ago. The next 25 years will be defined by what those who were experimented on rebuilt in their own vision.

In Chicago, we won’t be debating whether our children are worthy of investment. That question will be settled from the city to the statehouse. Instead, we’ll be celebrating generations of scholars, athletes and artists — proud CPS graduates — who are living proof that there is no better investment we can make than in our city’s young people.

Stacy Davis Gates is president of the Chicago Teachers Union and the Illinois Federation of Teachers.

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