End the Hunger Games

We now enter month 16 of the Albany Park hunger games, in which Haugan and North River elementary schools are locked in an intense and open-ended battle for the space vacated by ASPIRA on the third floor of the building at 3729 W. Leland.

Neighborhood families flock to Haugan because it is a school that does so much with so little. It must fight fiercely for basics that other communities take for granted, like private space for confidential counseling services, dual-language programming for English language learners and preschool classes. Even though the library is endlessly subdivided for various services and its art teacher needs to travel from classroom to classroom with a cart, it is the people in a building who make the community. Haugan’s teachers and staff rise to the challenge every day.

It’s also clear that the North River community is passionate about its school. This is good for Albany Park as a whole; hundreds of parents and community members voted in North River’s LSC election. Unfortunately, the election did not bring the two school communities any closer to working together.

We at Unite For Our Schools — Albany Park are open to a number of solutions, but all of them include Haugan students gaining at least temporary access to the third floor of the Leland building. So far, the only solution we’ve heard from North River is doubling its citywide, lottery-based program.

The schools serve very similar populations, our neighborhood has been decimated by ICE and many families are struggling. Why can’t these schools work together? Well, a very large and powerful entity known as Chicago Public Schools is pitting these two schools against each other. Here’s the background:

• 21 years ago, CPS overrode the community and gave the Leland Building to ASPIRA, even though it was created expressly for neighborhood students at Haugan.
• CPS concealed North River’s intent to take the whole Leland building from Haugan while at the same time setting up North River’s expectation that it is entitled to the Leland building without a community input process.
• In 2022, CPS falsely suggested to Haugan leadership that there would be collaboration between the two schools in the future. But in 2025, CPS discouraged this cooperation by instructing North River to ignore communications from Haugan.
• CPS chastised Haugan leadership for surveying the community, but then failed to do its own survey.
• CPS denied Haugan’s colocation request without public explanation and used questionable math to insist that the school is not crowded. At the same time, they’ve told news organizations and local leaders that the goal should be to restrict the neighborhood school’s growth.
• CPS’s solutions take resources like break room space, recess areas and restrooms away from the community while 13 empty classrooms stand a block away.
• CPS continues to equivocate a neighborhood school’s need for space with a lottery-based school’s desire to expand. CPS could simply mandate that North River limit its enrollment, over which it has full control.

As you can see, these hunger games have been manufactured by CPS. That’s why CPS needs to step up and fix it. They must follow their own strategic plan and support flourishing neighborhood schools. They need to offer a transparent solution that does not harm Haugan or turn away students and families who want to choose a neighborhood school.

UFOS-AP is open to the originally proposed colocation, North River becoming the neighborhood middle school with Haugan as the neighborhood pre-K through fifth grade school, or another solution entirely. These two populations can operate separately but in close coordination to bring to life the dream of the adequately resourced pre-K through 12th grade neighborhood school journey that was proposed 21 years ago.

Regardless, doing nothing for Haugan and allowing North River to expand greatly harms neighborhood students. North River can simply enroll fewer kids, but Haugan has no good solutions outside of the Leland building.

The bottom line? CPS can and must end the hunger games now.