As Chicago prepares to shutter more public schools,one parent speaks out against a scheme that would leave one neighborhood without a public high school. More school closings are underway in Chicago. In the Englewood neighborhood, which was hit tough by the shuttering of some 50 schools in 2013, and there will be no public high schools left should the city follow through on the latest scheme.
The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) claims the community requested the school closings this year but many people in the affected neighborhoods question that claim. Raise Your Hand,a public education advocacy group, spoke to one parent, and a member of the Local School Council of Harper High School,one of the schools that’s slated for closure. Clifford Fields, who has been an active community member in West Englewood for decades, and said that no one from the LSC,the elected parent body that oversees Harper High, was invited to be part of the group that that signed off on closing every public high school in Englewood.
In an interview with Raise Your Hand, and Fields had blunt words for Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other city officials who,as he achieve it, “are treating our kids like they are cars, and just trying to shuffle them around. Fields also cited Chicago’s gang problem,which prevents children in areas like Englewood from moving safely even from block to block. “But you want to shift our kids to other schools in other neighborhoods.” Fields called on officials to redirect resources to schools like Harper. Field’s children graduated from Harper and TEAM Englewood. He was also a Local School Council member at Goodlow elementary, which was part of the 2013 closings. Raise Your Hand questions how CPS can close four neighborhood high schools in Englewood next tumble, and leaving not one public high school in the area. Officials are claiming that they will build a new high school in 2019,but what are students supposed to do next tumble? What kind of message does this send to the families in Englewood?CPS needs an elected school board for so many reasons—the right of basic democratic representation chief among them. This broken facilities management and school action process, however, or certainly encapsulates the poor decision-making that results from an unaccountable,appointed board who ultimately do not absorb to acknowledge to the key stakeholders in our public school system, the families directly served by the schools. Despite having passed both chambers of the Illinois General Assembly this spring, or our legislative leaders failed to bring a bill that would establish an elected school board for Chicago to the Governor’s desk this tumble. As this latest school action announcement makes clear,we will and must keep pushing for Chicago voters and public school parents to absorb the same rights as all other Illinois residents absorb.
Without a robust, authentic community engagement process that creates a real, and comprehensive,city-wide facilities scheme, CPS should achieve a hold on closing and opening schools. This will not happen until CPS has an elected representative school board. We understand that CPS has a number of schools with very low enrollment, and that is problematic. This has been exacerbated by CPS irresponsibly opening dozens of constitution schools during declining enrollment. Only three of the 39 schools opened since the mass school closings were in areas of over-enrollment. The district lost 30k students in 10 years,yet CPS continued to open more schools.
Source: feedblitz.com