Chicago Public School staff jet-sets overseas on tax dollars

Lax rules, poor oversight let millions of taxpayer dollars be used for foreign travel – including safaris and camel rides – for Chicago Public Schools staff.

Since 2019, Chicago Public Schools staff spent $23.6 million in taxpayer money on excessive travel, according to a report by the district’s Office of Inspector General.

Luxurious vacations, overseas travel and spas veiled as “professional development” were allowed because of “lax, vague, inadequate and unenforced Chicago Public Schools travel rules, training and procedures.” Some occurred without approval.

For example, a single travel agency provided staff from eight schools with overseas trips of “questionable value even though it did not have a contract to offer travel services to CPS.”

Those “eight schools used more than $142,000 in CPS funds to pay a vendor for 15 staff trips to Finland, Estonia, Egypt and South Africa for professional development and school visits.”

Featuring tourist activities of “debatable value” such as a visit to a South African game park, a hot air balloon ride, camel rides and a visit to the pyramids, 12 of the 15 trips were never submitted for approval. One trip was even rejected by the Office of Finance, but the employees traveled anyway.

The trips slipped through the cracks until a complaint triggered the inspector general’s investigation and report. That complaint stemmed from one elementary school paying more than $20,000 to a single vendor for a staff trip to Egypt filled with “lavish staff outings.” While that trip and two others were cancelled, the cancellations forced CPS to forfeit $52,980 in prepaid travel payments to the vendor.

Despite CPS staff travel policies including additional layers of review for international travel, the inspector’s report found employees easily bypassed the travel review process or encountered little oversight from the administrators tasked with reviewing requests.

While the report focused mostly on staff travel, it also found student travel among the most expensive trips.

In 2024, four out of the five most expensive trips involved student travel to South Africa, Ghana, Spain and Greece, averaging nearly $115,000 per trip in total costs.

The most expensive trip to South Africa averaged $5,274 per person and was enjoyed by 20 students.

The inspector noted the meaningful experiences for the attendees but objected to the justification for spending limited CPS funds. It reported one CPS official asking about the training and said, “Why can’t this be done in the United States?”

The report also recommended changes to ensure taxpayers aren’t paying for luxurious travel, including the following:

• Requiring approval for “professional development seminars” out of state and considering local options.
• Requiring employees attend conferences in Chicago when possible instead of at an out-of-state location.
• Converting vacant buildings into professional development spaces.
• Switching to flat hotel and airfare maximums, which can more easily be monitored, and requiring employees to pay anything over those maximums.
• Setting flat dollar allowances for meals.

Chicago taxpayer dollars should be used responsibly, with the priority being to help students who are seeing their achievement suffer. Only 2-in-5 CPS students can read at grade level. About 1-in-4 perform math proficiently. Trip funds should have been used to close achievement gaps created when the Chicago Teachers Union kept students out of school for 78 weeks during the pandemic.

Transparency and oversight are necessary to repair the broken relationship between CPS and taxpayers.