Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and top aides diverted more than $58 million away from Chicago Public Schools to help plug a budget hole at City Hall shortly after he took office.

The extra cash went to the Chicago Police Department for unspecified security services provided before Emanuel was mayor — even though the school district offered no public accounting of what the money was paying for or a formal contract with the city for the work.

Now, with CPS facing a $480 million shortfall and threatening midyear teacher layoffs, Emanuel has pulled an about-face. The city is picking up the cost of officer patrols in schools at no charge to the district, a decision officials disclosed after the Chicago Tribune asked CPS questions about its police spending.

The Emanuel administration determined City Hall could afford to cover CPS’ police costs as the mayor was about to raise city taxes by $755 million, including a record property tax increase.

The shift illustrates Emanuel’s willingness to move money around based on where the financial crisis lies.

CPS channeled the police money to City Hall to help balance the city’s budget during a period when Emanuel had deemed raising property, sales or gas taxes politically and economically unpalatable as he faced a $636 million hole.

At the time, CPS was able to deliver the money to the city as the district raised property taxes. Four years later, the opposite dynamic played out, as City Hall had hit up taxpayers for a windfall.

CPS CEO Forrest Claypool described City Hall’s move to absorb police costs as “kind of just a final recognition that the city is providing this as a service to protect the schools, just like they do any other part of the city system.

“We’re grateful to Mayor Emanuel for that because this is a particularly hard time right now financially,” he said. “But the police in many schools are really important to our safety and also the perception of safety.”

CPS committed to transferring the $58 million as the district was rescinding teacher pay raises, laid off workers and cut its budget.

Jesse Sharkey, the Chicago Teachers Union vice president, said the school system never should have been paying for police services.

“It’s about time they admitted that,” Sharkey said. “Taking that off the schools budget is a good place to start.”

Emanuel communications director Kelley Quinn did not respond to questions about the sharp increase in payments CPS made to CPD as Emanuel worked to balance his first budgets as mayor. Instead, she emailed a statement.

“The deployment of officers in schools has been an important component of our citywide safety strategy,” Quinn said in the statement issued Sunday. “In recognition of the necessity of this continued partnership combined with CPS’ dire financial situation, beginning this year, the city will incur the cost of officers to the schools which require them.”

A ‘need to reduce violence’

While CPS spends tens of millions of dollars each year to pay for its own school security guards, it also has paid for a police presence inside school buildings.

Claypool recalled being enlisted by then-Mayor Richard M. Daley while working as his chief of staff to spearhead a project that eventually created a school patrol unit, which has since been disbanded.

Daley’s moves to place two officers in each public high school and push a controversial program to equip buildings with metal detectors were part of a renewed focus on school security reached amid the torment of urban crime driven by gang and drug-related violence.

More recently, high-profile incidents tightened the relationship between the police department and school system. That includes the 2009 beating death of Fenger High School student Derrion Albert, a videotaped incident that brought a renewed examination of Chicago’s long-standing struggles with youth violence and federal stimulus money to help pay for the Culture of Calm anti-violence program.

School closings also led to concerns about students crossing competing gang territories on the way to their new buildings.

“A lot of it sort of pushed this need to reduce violence,” recalled Jean-Claude Brizard, Emanuel’s first schools chief. “As you can imagine, when you look at the crime in the city, the murders of young people often is done by other young people who often were or are students within CPS,” he said.

“And again, you can’t just ask the police department to dispatch people into these schools full time without, of course, finding ways to support that kind of financial burden on them.”

It’s not unusual for the country’s largest school districts to spend big on police security today, at a time when law enforcement’s presence on school grounds is drawing scrutiny.

Los Angeles has its own school police department of 350 sworn officers at an estimated yearly cost of $59 million. New York, meanwhile, has an agreement with police to provide security services at around $248 million a year.

CPS justifies a police presence in school buildings to protect students and staff, but it also helps the district guard against liability.

The district’s tort fund is the primary account used to pay for security costs — it’s funded mostly by property taxes, and is also used to pay for legal settlements, workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance.

Payments for police are sometimes channeled from the district to the department and city under the authority of contracts between CPS and CPD that are approved by the school board and City Council.

Extra payments, few details

For years, CPS paid a fraction of what it now pays to have sworn officers do “tours of duty” at various schools and mobile unit patrols of troubled areas, not to mention to support truancy enforcement, metal detector programs and student outreach. Prior to Emanuel’s tenure, the district’s annual payments to the police department were generally lower.

During the 2004 through 2011 CPS budget years, the district paid an average of $8.6 million a year. During the four years before Emanuel was mayor, the police department received about $36.8 million from CPS.

But since Emanuel took office, the payments increased sharply, with City Hall reeling in more than $100 million from CPS, records show.

In February 2010, the Chicago Board of Education agreed to spend $32.8 million on CPD costs from 2009 to 2012. Officers would serve eight-hour stints at 97 schools.

CPS started paying, according to city and school records. But when asked for a copy of the contract through an open records request, the school district said there wasn’t one.

In July 2011, two months after Emanuel was sworn in, school administrators began to publicly argue that CPS owed tens of millions of dollars to make up for police services provided since 2009.

“This is a significant expenditure, and we need to look at which schools need this, which schools don’t and how can we be more creative for the schools in the middle,” then-district chief administrative officer Tim Cawley said at the time.

Emanuel’s hand-picked school board scrapped the less-costly 2010 agreement in favor of a new contract that would end up costing an extra $58 million.

Here’s the math on that: In 2012, CPS agreed to pay $47 million for services provided between the 2009 and 2011 budget years and $26 million in 2013, though the district paid only $11 million that year, for a total of $58 million.

The extra payments, the board said, were “necessary to fully compensate CPD for charges associated with police services CPD has provided to the board since Jan. 1, 2009.” But what specifically the district was paying for remains unclear.

The payments were made for services provided when there was no formal contract in place.

Still, Jadine Chou, the school district’s chief safety and security officer, told the Tribune that CPS had to make good on bills it owed the police department.

“There were invoices prior to that totaling up to $57 million,” Chou said. “That doesn’t mean that those expenses all were incurred in one school year. … But those payments would’ve been, again, for invoices prior to that time period.”

The Tribune filed an open records request with the school district on July 31 for the invoices and other records. CPS acknowledged receiving the request but has not provided any records.

When asked why the district owed the lump sums to the police department to begin with, Chou responded, “I couldn’t explain that.”

Brizard, who was in charge of the district at the time, recalled feeling a responsibility “to do the right thing.”

“Frankly, while the money issue was a difficult pill to swallow, I did not want that to come in between us,” he said. “I knew it wouldn’t have, because they’re professionals — but our sister agencies, you want to do what’s right.”

To help come up with the sudden request for tens of millions of dollars in additional payments, the district used close to $19 million that was earmarked to pay substitute teachers.

In 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union ripped the move in the run-up to the first teacher’s strike in a quarter-century, accusing the district of paying the police department with money diverted from teacher salaries and unemployment benefits in an effort to skirt paying a rescinded 4 percent pay raise.

The district’s current police services contract is scheduled to run through December at $13 million a year.

As the Tribune started asking questions about police services spending, district officials said in late August that the city would pick up all of the costs.

The district paid $32 million, records show, so they’re off the hook for the remaining $6.5 million. Just a few years after Emanuel aides insisted that the school district needed to pay more for police, the administration says that’s no longer the case.

“Essentially, the rationale for why it makes sense is these are police officers who would be serving their community anyway,” said Chou, the district’s chief security officer. “Potentially, the school serves as their assignment as a beat. So if you think of it that way, they’re on duty serving the community as it stands.”

Chicago Tribune’s Bill Ruthhart and Heather Gillers contributed.

(c)2015 the Chicago Tribune Visit the Chicago Tribune at www.chicagotribune.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.