And Austin Business is not alone.

Two other high schools located inside the same building have enrolled just 20 and 24 freshmen each. Three separate principals oversee the three schools.

Then there’s Hirsch Metropolitan High School on 79th and Ingleside: It has 22 ninth graders.

Chicago International Charter School’s Larry Hawkins campus in Altgeld Gardens registered only 37 freshman.

In all, a dozen high schools across the city have 50 or fewer students in the freshman class. And ninth grade is usually the largest in a high school.

Since WBEZ first wrote about dramatic underenrollment at high schools in 2013, things have only gotten worse. Enrollment at many of the schools is so low, it raises questions of whether they can recover.  

Official district enrollment numbers show Chicago now has 38 high schools with fewer than 400 high schoolers each. That’s fewer students than even advocates of small schools say is needed to provide a solid education. Under the district’s student-based budgeting, the numbers in some cases are not enough to pay for the principal and a full set of teachers.

And there’s another fallout: running such small schools is tremendously inefficient, costing taxpayers and the district extra at a time when Chicago Public Schools is seeking help from Springfield just to get through the year without massive layoffs.

Long-time neighborhood schools

The city’s withering high schools include institutions that have educated generations of Chicagoans and have been seen as community pillars: Bowen, Collins, Corliss, Fenger, Harper, Hirsch, Manley, Richards, Robeson, Tilden—all are teetering. But it isn’t just neighborhood schools. Some charter schools and high schools that draw from the entire city find themselves in a similar bind, struggling to recruit students in an environment in which CPS has continued to rapidly open additional high schools in an effort to improve school quality—even though enrollment is not growing.

Nearly all schools with dramatically declining enrollment have one thing in common: they serve predominantly African American students on the city’s South and West sides. Their students are some of the poorest, most vulnerable in the city.

The racial disparity raises questions about how school choice plays out in a segregated city, and whether neighborhood schools—particularly in low-income African American neighborhoods—are viable in Chicago’s current school choice environment.

“The fact that we have schools where they are only enrolling 13 freshmen is really part of this ideology of configuring public education in a kind of market model,” said Mary Pattillo, a sociologist at Northwestern University who authored a study on how families are participating in Chicago’s system of school choice.

Pattillo says schools that don’t capture parents, don’t market themselves, or don’t attract students— “they’ll just die. But while those schools are dying, there are students in those schools dying with those schools,” Pattillo said. “And the inability of those schools to provide a high-quality education despite their high desire to do so is not acceptable.”

Peter Cunningham sees benefits in a more market-driven system. Cunningham is the executive director of the national education reform group Education Post and was spokesman under Arne Duncan, who launched the city’s Renaissance 2010 initiative—which opened more than 100 new schools —and closed others—in an effort to improve education in Chicago. “There is a consequence to choice,” says Cunningham. “You’re going to have schools that are losing enrollment either because kids don’t want to go there or they’re not providing the kind of education kids want.”

Cunningham says that without Chicago’s plethora of high school options, there might be better enrollment in the neighborhood high schools, but “it’s also possible that we would have lost a whole lot of families who would have chosen private schools or moved out of the city.” Still, he admits, “We can’t afford to have more schools than we have students.”

CPS spokeswoman Emily Bittner declined to answer questions about high school under-enrollment and would not say whether the city should brace for massive school closures at the high school level. She also would not authorize principals from under-enrolled schools to speak.

High schools dying a slow death

A massive expansion in the number of high schools in the city—opened in an effort to create high quality schools and expand options for students—has contributed to the under-enrollment crisis being faced  today by many schools.

In 2004, Chicago had 88 high schools and 99,275 high schoolers. Today the city has 140 high schools (a 59 percent increase) for 100,670 students in grades 9-12 (a 1.5 percent increase). That’s not counting alternative students or schools, which have also expanded exponentially.

With each new high school that opens, other schools in the system face enrollment declines. A dozen recently opened high schools added grades and students this year and are slated to continue expanding. In September, CPS agreed to re-open Dyett High School following a hunger strike protesting the its closure. And on Wednesday, the school board will vote on whether to green light another new charter high, set to open in the fall.

At the same time, fully one-third of the city’s high schools are withering.

Under Chicago’s school choice system—students can go to high school anywhere they’re accepted, including other neighborhood schools. This year, 14 percent of Chicago’s 100,670 high schoolers go to a selective enrollment school they test into, including nearly all the city’s highest performing students. Another 24 percent go to charter schools. Numbers from prior years suggest about 30 percent of students go to their attendance-area neighborhood school, and the rest go to magnet, military or other neighborhood schools—which might offer arts, IB, career-education or STEM programs. For low performers, neighborhood schools offer something that’s increasingly difficult to find: a high school kids can enroll in without having to apply months in advance or meet a minimum threshold for grades or test scores.