Giving Compass' Take:

• In Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood, Oscar Mayer Magnet School is looking to offer neighborhood families free tuition for preschoolers but not for students that are currently enrolled.

• How will this decision impact families, especially as it is among Chicago's plan to rollout free universal pre-k for 4-year-olds?

• Read more about the cities that are implementing universal pre-k.

Trimming back a years long benefit for families in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, the Chicago school district has proposed charging parents nearly $14,000 a year for a popular magnet preschool that until now has been offered to neighborhood families for free.

But the district would exempt current pre-K students. That would mean some families would pay tuition for their 3- and 4-year-olds to attend Oscar Mayer Magnet School in the fall, but others would not. The school would become the 12th public preschool in the city to charge tuition.

The change comes despite a larger push citywide to open up more free pre-K seats through one of Rahm Emanuel’s signature school efforts: free universal preschool for 4-year-olds.

The city is rolling out its universal pre-K plan across the next three years, with neighborhoods on the South and West side getting priority this fall. Lincoln Park is in the last wave of that phase-in, for the school year 2021-22, but the fate of tuition programs has not been determined, according to the district.

The change at Mayer is a “unique situation,” said Chief Academic Officer LaTanya McDade, one that stems from a critical Office of the Inspector General report from last year.

In the report, Inspector General Nicholas Schuler said that Mayer was the only magnet elementary school in the city to give students in the attendance zone first dibs on free seats. Other magnet pre-K programs draw students via citywide lottery.

Because of Mayer’s popularity, no pre-K students from outside the attendance zone won seats by lottery in the 2017-2018 school year, the report said. What’s more, many families left the public schools after pre-K.

Read the full article about universal pre-k in Chicago by Cassie Walker Burke at Chalkbeat.