A Tale of Two Headlines

The Sun Times:

• Spending at neighborhood schools to drop by $60 million

That's a good thing, right?

• Chicago’s neighborhood public schools could suffer $60 million in cuts while charters and contract schools may gain $30 million, under school budgets released Monday.
  
  Some of the largest cuts will be borne by neighborhood high schools on the city’s South and West sides.

As predicted, the "charter schools" will gain while the neighborhood schools bleed.

But then the Tribune has this headline:

• Chicago Public Schools' budgets spend $500 million district doesn't have

Now how can that be possible? We can't even spend $500 we don't have without a bunch of nasty calls from the credit union:

• Chicago Public Schools on Monday unveiled school spending plans that rely on a half-billion dollars more than the district has on hand — an approach the head of the city's principals association compared to writing a bad check.
  
  To make the individual school budgets work, CPS is banking on help from Springfield, which has so far been uncooperative. Without that, the district said it will have to resort to "unsustainable borrowing and additional cuts" midway through the coming school year.

This would be the "Springfield" that can't even get a budget passed, despite a super-majority of democrats in charge of the purse strings and a governor playing chicken with them so he can run a whole slate of republicans against them next fall painting them all as tax-raising assholes - which they are anyway.