WBEZ | Education

Final hours at Bontemps Elementary

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 16:45:00 -0500

Principal Allen Mosley did not stay home from school the day he fell down the stairs at home. He showed up to school with a broken rib.

"I was right here walking sideways with these students," Mosley said from the principal's office at Bontemps Elementary School. "There’s nothing like these kids here. We don’t know what we’re gonna do without ‘em."

Today might be one of the hardest days of Mosley’s life. He says he's missed just five days of work since he started at Bontemps 24 years ago as a substitute teacher (he remembers the exact date: April 4, 1989).

For 27 schools that Chicago’s board of education voted to close last month, today is the last day of school--ever.

How do you shut down an elementary school? If you are Mosley, you keep things going. That’s why, even on Tuesday afternoon, every inch of wall space in Room 111 is still covered with hand-made posters—guides for the first graders. How to find the permimeter of a rectangle. What the main idea is.

"We’ve been working on sight words--like game, make, maybe, crayon," the first graders say. "We’ve been working on compare and contrast. Summarizing. We’ve been working on our fractions. Times tables!"

At the time of my visit, Bontemps has fewer than 10 more hours to live, and staff are still teaching, which the principal is proud of. But no one hides the fact that they feel closing this school is a mistake.

"Close schools like this down, you’re breaking down links and you’re breaking up generational traditions. They’re forced to go to other schools where there’s no history for them behind it," says first grade teacher Felicia Kyle.

"Is there anybody in this classroom whose parents went here?" she asks the class.

Most hands shoot up, and kids rattle off relatives who studied in these same classrooms--moms, dads, grandmas, uncles.

Right up until the last day, students ask Principal Mosley why their school is closing.

"Can we save the school?" fifth grader Isaiah Conley asked Mosley when he stopped by his class Tuesday.

"We tried , Isaiah," Mosley tells him. "We went to all those meetings, we went to all those public hearings, we wrote letters, but they said no."

Isaiah is sitting in a chair that's just a little bit apart from everyone else in the class. It's not the corner of the room, but it kind of is. "I’m gonna miss this school, even though I’m a trouble maker," Isaiah says. "I still have feelings for this school. 'Cause all the staff and everybody loves me. And they always support me when I do wrong. They tell me, Don’t do it no more, and I don’t. That’s why I don’t want the school to close."

Being at Bontemps in its final hours, it feels like visiting someone who’s about to die.

In the library, there are three palettes of collapsed cardboard boxes. They will be opened and filled with everything in this school.

Graduates have been coming back to Bontemps. Some say they just want to be in the school one last time. A girl who used to play on the basketball team came back, and asked Mosley if she could take home the trophy she helped win.

Mosley pauses at the trophy case.

"This is from 1989--it’s been here almost 25 years," he says. Looking at a school's trophy case is like reading a little bit of its history. Mosley names the plaques behind the glass: basketball, double Dutch, tennis, flag football, essay writing contests, science fair, the choir.

This afternoon, the bell rang for the very last time at Bontemps. The unclaimed trophies, and the rest of Bontemps history, will go into boxes beginning tomorrow.

Garden learning in southwest side schools

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 14:09:00 -0500

Though they occupy the same plot of land in the southwest side neighborhood of Garfield Ridge, students from two adjacent primary schools — one public, one charter — rarely meet.

Phoebe A. Hearst Fine Arts Magnet School and the Academy for Global Citizenship share a campus at 4640 S. Lamon Ave. At their closest point the buildings almost touch, with only a 3,500 square foot asphalt corridor linking the parking lot with 46^th Street between them.

On Tuesday students from both schools giddily assembled to cut the ribbon on the new garden and outdoor classroom that replaced that spit of blacktop with green space.

The project is part of nonprofit conservation group Openlands’ Building School Gardens program, which has helped create 54 gardens at schools throughout the region since 2006. They began by working only on sites that already had green space, but have since received enough funding to pursue projects that flip concrete into gardens.

“A lot of kids in cities don’t have a connection to nature,” said Openlands’ Kristin LoVerde. “A place like this helps bring it to them.”

Working with Christy Webber Landscapes, “garden teams” of parents, students and faculty settled on a few key criteria for the Hearst/AGC garden. They decided it should have an outdoor classroom, a vegetable garden, trees for shade, rain barrels and native plants. The 12 raised vegetable beds, which occupy blacktop in addition to the 3,500 square foot space, have been planted with beets, carrots and greens. AGC has a pilot program focused on serving vegetables produced on site, so the students will get to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

“It’s not just science and math that you can teach in a garden,” LoVerde said. “Even just reading a book out here has an impact.”

Students from both schools moved the soil, mulched and installed some 400 plants, many of them meeting for the first time.

In the fall local art group Green Star Movement will help install murals on either side of the new garden. As the school year closed Wednesday, Openlands was on hand to help install their next project in McKinley Park.

Chris Bentley writes about the environment. Follow him on Twitter at @Cementley.

Lewis: Loyalty to public schools should rival that of Cubs fans

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 09:21:00 -0500

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis wants people to rally around the city’s public schools like loyal Chicago Cubs fans.

Lewis made the analogy in a speech titled “On Baseball and Budgets” that she delivered at a City Club luncheon Tuesday.

“When the Cubs lose a game, they don’t call for Wrigley Field to close down,” Lewis said. “They don’t want the entire team dismantled. And despite some empty seats, the stadium isn’t accused of being underutilized.”

Last month, Chicago Public Schools announced it would close 50 schools officials considered “underutilized,” or in other words, did not have enough students enrolled.

“Despite game losses and near wins, the fans continue to show up,” Lewis continued. “We keep cheering for our Cubbies. We know they are winners. We believe. We don’t let the statistics drive our beliefs. But do the same for our children. Cheer them on, invest in them, love them, support their parents, support their teachers, and support their schools.”

But a large part of Lewis’s speech focused on ways the district could increase revenue—like ending corporate loopholes, a progressive tax, and re-negotiating interest rates with big banks. Lewis claimed such moves could generate as much as $600 million.

CPS spokeswoman Kelley Quinn said re-negotiating interest rates could actually cost CPS money.

The speech Tuesday comes on the heels of mass layoffs late last week. CPS issued more than 800 pink slips (link) to employees at closing schools. But more layoffs could come as other schools across the district grapple with budget cuts at the school level. (link)

CPS has said it is facing a $1 billion deficit next year, which includes about $400 million in increased pension payments. But when asked about how that contributed to cuts being made at schools, Lewis blamed the tight budgets on the district’s new way of funding schools.

This year, principals are being given a set amount of money per student, rather than being allocated teaching positions and money for specific programs.

Like she has repeatedly over the last two years, Lewis again brought up the issue of race and inequality in public education, noting that the poor and minority students end up with worse learning conditions than their more affluent peers.

Lewis also took aim at corporate education reformers saying, “There’s something about these folks that use little black and brown children as stage props at one press conference, while announcing they want to fire, layoff or lock up their parents at another press conference.”

Despite her fiery rhetoric at times, Lewis repeatedly said she hoped to collaborate more with CPS and City Hall.

Becky Vevea is a WBEZ education reporter. Follow her @WBEZeducation. Aaron Atchison is an intern on the WBEZ education desk.

CPS issues pink slips to over 800 employees

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 16:25:00 -0500

Employees at schools being shut down or shaken up at the end of this year are being let go today, according to Chicago Public School officials.

More than 800 employees are affected, but there could be many more. The numbers released by CPS today do not include administrators and do not count layoffs in other district schools that are also facing shrinking budgets.

“We do think this is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Jackson Potter, staff coordinator for the Chicago Teachers Union.

Reports from parents, teachers and principals across the city indicate that people at closing schools are not the only ones who stand to lose their jobs. Potter said, ironically, many of the positions added last year for the longer school day are being cut.

“We’re seeing all of the additional staff from music, world language, art, are being cut, librarians being removed and eliminated from a variety of schools across the district,” Potter said. “It’s really hard to say how damaging and disruptive these austerity budgets are going to be but it’s drastic.”

However, teachers at closing schools with superior or excellent performance ratings are eligible to apply for jobs at receiving schools if there are openings. But CPS officials said they won’t know how many vacancies there will be until mid-July.

CPS officials said, on average, about 60 percent of teachers who lose their positions at one school, but reapply at others get rehired somewhere else in the system.

Becky Vevea is a WBEZ education reporter. Follow her @WBEZeducation.

Chicago schools facing cuts under new funding system

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 06:00:00 -0500

Public schools across Chicago are seeing budget cuts that could force layoffs, increased class sizes and more reductions to specialty programs, like art and music.

“We lost $468,000 in funding and we are slated to lose about four positions and this would mean split classrooms and for the first time, possibly, overcrowding,” said Nellie Cotton, an LSC member and parent of two students at Grimes-Fleming Elementary on the city’s Southwest Side.

Grimes-Fleming is not the only school seeing cuts. A teacher at Roosevelt High School confirmed a $1.1 million decrease in the school’s budget, Lincoln Park High School reported a drop of about $1 million and Goethe Elementary is slated for about $265,000 less. Teachers at Von Steuben High School said they weren’t sure exactly how much their budget decreased, but had been told they may no longer have a librarian, a writing center or an administrator to deal with discipline issues.

Chicago Public Schools officials said, like any year, many schools may see cuts, while others are likely to see increases. District spokeswoman Becky Carroll did not say if the overall amount of money spent at the school level would decrease, noting that the budget is not yet final.

Carroll did acknowledge that “given the depth of this historic financial crisis it will be difficult to avoid any cuts or reductions to funding in schools.”

CPS is fundamentally changing how it distributes money to individual schools. Instead of providing positions and buckets of money for specific programs, principals are getting a specific amount for every child that enrolls at their school. Some 40 schools and the district’s 100 charter schools have been funded this way for several years.

Last week, CPS officials announced how much schools would get per student, which turned out to be less than what pilot and charter schools were getting this year.

Andrew Broy, president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, said charters are still crunching numbers but overall, charter grammar schools are seeing mostly level funding or slight increases, while charter high school budgets are overall declining.

It remained unclear how neighborhood schools and others funded on the old formula would be impacted until the last couple of days, as local school councils held meetings to discuss their finances.

As news of cuts trickled out, the Chicago Teachers Union sent a release listing the budget cuts they had heard about and blasting CPS for putting out a plan for quality schools just days before telling schools how little they would get next year.

“Recently they announced a plan for a ‘quality, 21st century education’,” CTU president Karen Lewis said in a statement. “Their 21st century plan looks more like a 19th century plan.”

CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett issued a statement calling CTU’s allegations “disappointing and not accurate.” She again said the new funding formula will give principals “unprecedented control over their budget.”

At Von Steuben High School, history teacher Mary Brandt said she can’t fathom operating the school without a library, but doesn’t blame her principal for making the decision.

“The principal, I’m sure doesn’t want to close the library,” Brandt said. “I think the principal is trying to figure out how to make this money work. But I think they’ve been given an impossible situation.”

Colleen Dillon has two children at Burr Elementary and said the old funding formula did feel a little arbitrary and required creativity on the part of the principal. But no matter how money is distributed, cuts are still cuts.

“It’s not the per-pupil funding I find offensive, it’s the miniscule amount that they’re giving per pupil,” Dillon said.

Spokeswoman Carroll would not talk about specific school budgets and said the district’s complete budget proposal would likely not be public until late July. She did definitively say that budgets would go up at schools designated to receive students from the 50 closing schools.

In a first, Chicago math team takes top trophy in Illinois

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 17:59:00 -0500

After school, in a classroom with lights off and the window shades drawn, kids on the Whitney Young math team sit in pairs. Their teacher flashes a problem on the screen—a problem that stretches on and on—and fingers fly over calculator buttons.

Two students sitting near the front of the room divide the problem, one taking the first part, the other one solving the final part. They’re racing against their teammates.

There’s a three-minute limit, but these students have the answer long before the annoying buzzer goes off. What’s impressive is the problem:

It takes 23 seconds just to read out loud. By that time, some of the kids have nearly solved it.

Struggling schools are a familiar story in Chicago, but the city is also home to some of the very best public schools in Illinois. Chicago’s Whitney Young High School is a powerhouse in sports and academics. And recently, the school brought home the top trophy in the state for math.

“In preparation for contests, we usually will try to put together a practice that is 100 times harder than the actual contest would be,” said Matthew Moran, one of the team’s two coaches. “That’s getting harder and harder as they get better.”

To toughen up players, coaches don’t just forbid calculators for certain problems—they sometimes forbid pencils.

“We try to handicap the juniors and seniors by telling them they can’t use pencils or paper,” Julienne Au said.

That sort of practice is what got the team to the Illinois state math competition last month in Urbana-Champaign. The top contest features written and oral tests, team and individual exams, and relays.

Chicago public schools have won lower divisions of the state math competition. But in 33 years, they’ve never won the most competitive category. That title has gone to schools like Naperville North, New Trier, or the Illinois Math and Science Academy, which draws top math students from all over the state. This year, the team to beat was Adlai Stevenson, in Lincolnshire.

“In our heads, for me at least, I could hear them announcing, ‘Second place is Whitney Young,’” remembers Young senior Annie Chen. “I was waiting for it to happen and not happen at the same time. And then when they announced Stevenson in second place, we kind of went crazy.”

Students and coaches say they filled the room with cheers. Nobody could even hear the school’s name called in first place, they were screaming so loudly.

But it wasn’t quite over. Second-place Stevenson did what would make any math teacher proud—the team double checked the grading of all its papers, and actually found a mistake. The teams got on their buses to go back home without knowing for sure who was in first place and who was in second. Whitney Young took home the first-place trophy they’d been given, and about an hour into their ride home, they found it was theirs to keep.

It’s gotten harder in recent years to gain admission to Whitney Young, but Moran says his team members aren’t prodigies. They’ve made a steady climb from 18th place six years ago to 15th to 11th to 6th to 2nd place last year.

“In six years people don’t turn into geniuses. In six years people work really hard and learn how to learn math.”

At a pep rally last month—at a school that holds lots of pep rallies—the math team finally got theirs.

“We’ve been coming to pep rallies for a lot of years wishing that it was us on the stage winning the state championship,” Moran told students. “So thanks to the band and to the cheerleaders… and to everybody who made this happen.”

That’s right, the band and the cheerleaders came out for the math team. The head of the state math competition says in addition to a tough curriculum and dedicated coaches, winning math teams often do something less tangible—they manage to make math cool, like football or basketball. Something kids would want to stay after school for.

Student journalist Aaron Atchison contributed to this report.

Linda Lutton is a WBEZ education reporter. Follow her @WBEZeducation

No simple answers for Chicago's severely overcrowded schools

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 05:00:00 -0500

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Chicago is boarding up 50 public schools over the summer because, officials say, the schools have too few kids to keep operating.

But for every one that Chicago Public Schools is closing, there’s a severely overcrowded school, many where parents and administrators are begging for expensive additions.

It’s all one district—so it seems like there should be a way to even things out. But it’s not an easy problem to solve.

Every corner of Peck Elementary School—from the entry ways to the closets—is used by someone throughout the day. The music teacher’s “office” is on a corner of the stage. The social worker meets with students in the projection room. The bilingual coordinator works in a closet-sized room at the top of a stairwell.

Principal Okab Hassan says the school has been packed full for more than a decade.

The old library is now a food preparation center. The old cafeteria has been converted into two classrooms, each now filled with about 35 fifth grade students.

“According to the board, we are 206 percent overcapacity and still they’re discussing how they can build us a school,” Hassan said.

Peck is one of 50 schools the district considers severely overcrowded, with a 206 percent utilization rate. In all, the district has 81 overcrowded buildings, according to its utilization formula.

Four years ago, the Board of Education approved a resolution to build a $54 million addition at Peck. It would have been finished this fall. Instead, Peck is getting a mobile unit, bringing the total number of temporary classrooms parked on the playground to 18. That doesn’t count the classrooms in the annex behind the main building.

Hassan jokes the school grounds look like a refugee camp.

The city’s predominantly Latino Southwest Side is hardest hit by overcrowding. The Northwest Side is also hard hit, and pockets of overcrowding are popping up around successful schools that attract middle class families on the north side.

At Wildwood Elementary, principal Mary Beth Cunat is constantly trying to find space in her small building--it’s now at 175 percent capacity. Thursdays are particularly difficult because clinicians who work with special needs students are at the school.

“Good morning, this is a reminder that on Thursdays the stage is used for clinician work so students are not allowed to do rehearsals or projects on the stage on Thursdays,” Cunat announced over the loud speaker a couple of weeks ago.

Cunat’s office is in the library closet and she shares it with two other administrators—the International Baccalaureate coordinator and the librarian. Last year, a cohort of 8th grade students did not have a permanent room. Instead, they used whatever room was empty during any given period.

“If the fifth graders were at gym, they would use that fifth grade room, it was just really a scramble,” Cunat said.

Wildwood parents have been begging the Board of Education for an annex for the last couple of months. They’ve had a temporary mobile for 13 years and still don’t have room for all of the students.

And all of this is going on at the same time a political battle is being waged over the fate of schools the district considers under-enrolled.

So, how can a district have both under-enrolled schools and over-enrolled schools? If the city is in control of both, why can’t it find a solution? A solution that wouldn’t involve the painful process of closing schools and building expensive new ones.

“It seems intuitive, but it’s a bit like saying on any given night there are fifty restaurants where people are lined up outside the door and there are fifty other restaurants where the tables are empty,” said Charlie Wheelan, author of Naked Economics and a professor of economics and public policy at Dartmouth University. “No one would ever suggest, well let’s just take the overcrowded restaurants and send them somewhere else. People don’t want to go there. It’s really about changing the food that’s being served. It’s not just about moving customers around.”

Wheelan said most cost-effective options, like busing kids or adjusting attendance boundaries, are a hard sell for parents who are invested in a certain school.

“Parents who have bought into a certain school are very resistant to then being told they’re going to a school, it may be close, but it’s not what they intended to do,” he said.

One way to get parents to buy into busing or moving kids, Wheelan said, would be to replicate the academic program at the overcrowded school in another underutilized or empty school building in a less crowded area.

But even that can be hard in a city plagued with violence and deep racial divides.

CPS officials are not too specific about long-term strategies to address overcrowding, but a draft ten-year facilities plan put out last month hints at solutions:

Preliminary analysis of the current overcrowding situations suggests that many, perhaps nearly two-thirds of the overcrowding situations, could theoretically be solved through means much more cost effective than by building expensive additional capacity, by making policy decisions -- albeit very difficult decisions for those affected by them. We believe that if these alternative methods of overcrowding relief were fully deployed, overcrowding could be solved with approximately $500-600 Million, but it is unrealistic to expect those other means could be successfully deployed to resolve each of these situations. In addition, at the time of this publication, we are evaluating adding additional temporary capacity - and may be able to relocate temporary capacity from some of our less utilized schools in order to accomplish this.

Board of Education Vice President Jesse Ruiz says, frankly, the district doesn’t have the money to construct new schools, so district officials are looking for creative solutions.

“You can’t pick up facilities and move them, but students perhaps are a little bit more mobile, and (we’re) seeing where we can kind of level-load the system and making sure we can help those students and making sure they also have great educational opportunities as well,” Ruiz said.

Busing is not cheap, but it’s far less expensive than building a new school. District officials said a bus route costs about $50,000 each year and temporary mobile buildings cost about $1.6 million to install. An annex or addition can run between $17 and $20 million, while a brand new elementary school facility is roughly $45 million.

CPS officials are working to relieve overcrowding at 22 schools for next year. Annexes are being built at Bell, Durkin Park, Hale, Onahan, Edison Park, Stevenson, Coonley and Oriole Park; they plan to install mobile classrooms at Dirksen, Gray, Little Village, Locke, Lyon, Tonti and Peck; and officials are leasing private space for Chavez, Columbia Explorers, Peck, Smyser, Tarkington, Sandoval, Coonley and Edwards.

The additional mandate of full-day kindergarten for every school left many already-overcrowded schools scrambling for space. In the case of Edwards, CPS initially proposed another modular unit, but parents refused and instead the school will lease space in a nearby church as a temporary solution.

Adam Waytz is a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and teaches a class on how to navigate ethical decision-making when there aren’t clear right or wrong answers. He says organizations have to engage their communities first and then develop a long-term strategy.

“There needs to be a focus on what’s best for the long-term, potentially even at the expense of the short term,” Waytz said. “It’s not clear to me what the long term goal is here.”

Without a long-term strategy, Waytz said, organizations like CPS end up always reacting, or putting out fires.

That’s what’s happening right now at places like Peck and Wildwood. And parents caught in the middle are frustrated.

Deanna Conklin Danao has two children at Wildwood.

“Each time CPS turns over and gets a new CEO and a new staff is hired and people who understood what was going on are let go or repositioned, our children age and in that process, your kids are never going to see an addition,” Conklin Danao said. “My kids in first and second grade are unlikely to see an addition and if they do it would be middle school, at best. Our kids age in this system and it just keeps happening on the backs of them.”

The day after I visited, CPS sent an architect to Wildwood.

But they’re not thinking about building an addition or looking at a long term solution. The architect is drawing up plans that will convert the library into a classroom by knocking down the wall to principal Cunat’s closet office.

CPS five-year plan lacks specifics

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 18:01:00 -0500

Chicago Public Schools officials put out a five-year plan Monday called “The Next Generation: Chicago’s Children,” but didn’t go into much depth about how it will be implemented.

The 28-page, glossy booklet is broken into five parts—or pillars—that CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett said will improve the public schools.

“In our classrooms right now is a Nobel prize winner, a world-renowned auther, an Olympic gold medalist, the next Miles Davis, the next Barack Obama,” Byrd-Bennett said. “And equally important are our future teachers, our future doctors, our future businessmen, our future attorneys. They’re right there. We need to incorporate all the assets of this incredible city into our children’s education.”

The plan comes less than a month after the Board of Education voted to shut down 50 public schools, mostly on the South and West sides of the city.

The five pillars—high academic standards, principal leadership, parent and community engagement, effective teachers and accountability—have been talked about frequently since Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office, but this is the first time his administration has put out a formal blueprint for the schools.

Still, the plan is light on details—especially how the cash-strapped district will pay for some of the initiatives they hope to implement, like attendance teams and parent universities.

But board member Mahalia Hines said just having a plan down on paper gets everyone on the same page.

“I think that my favorite part is that we actually have a plan that I can get my hands around,” Hines said at an event unveiling the document Monday at Westinghouse College Prep, one of the city’s selective enrollment high schools. “I see the people at the board coming together with a common goal and some common language.”

It’s the first formal education plan put out since Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office two years ago. But just before Emanuel was sworn in, interim CPS CEO Terry Mazany put out his vision for the schools. The two plans have some overlap, but the new one focuses more on accountability.

The new plan outlines a district scorecard that will measure outcomes across the district, when it comes to student on-track rates, attendance, teacher retention and college enrollment rates.

Byrd-Bennett’s vision also involves a couple of mandates, including one that was met with applause from those who attended the Westinghouse event.

“Every adult employed by our district will be responsible for mentoring one child, one hour, every week,” Byrd-Bennett said. She also called on all Chicagoans to help out, saying “We need an army of believers.”

Other mandates might be more difficult to accomplish without additional resources or support. For instance, schools are required to implement full-day kindergarten and also must to put together an attendance team that will track chronically truant students. The district is implementing “Parent Universities” to help parents get involved at their schools and they’ve already opened three “Re-engagement Centers” in Garfield Park, Roseland and Little Village to re-enroll dropouts.

Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis immediately blasted the five-year plan.

“Our schools communities do not lack inspiration, they lack revenue,” Lewis said in an e-mailed statement. “It doesn’t matter what new initiatives CPS concocts from year to year if it has no way to appropriately fund them.”

CPS has said it is facing a $1 billion deficit. When asked for an updated deficit figure, CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll said the numbers are shifting and district officials hope to put out a budget by the end of the month. The district is fundamentaly changing how individual schools are funded next year, as well.

Board member Hines, a former principal, said the new way of funding schools helps principals think creatively about what their individual schools need at a time when budgets are increasingly tight.

“Money’s not always the key,” Hines said. “I’m not saying we don’t want any, but it’s not always the key. I think the key is going to be having committed, intelligent, informed leaders in the schools.”

Chicago principals recently received their individual school budgets, which are based on a new formula. It’s not clear how many schools will see cuts, but overall, the per student rates appear to be less than what pilot schools had this past year.

Harper High School kids meet the president: 'My whole body just got weak'

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 18:00:00 -0500

A bus full of students and staff from Harper High School returned to Chicago Friday morning from a visit to the White House. They were invited by First Lady Michelle Obama and got to meet the President as well.

The First Lady took an interest in the students after This American Life aired episodes about how the school has been dealing with gun violence in the Englewood neighborhood. Mrs. Obama met with them in Chicago in April, then invited the students to her house.

Many of the students who went on the trip were featured in WBEZ’s This American Life episodes:

Deonte, the student who has avoided street violence by staying inside the house all the time;

Antoryio, who has been shot at so often he has a strategy--he drops to the ground;

Thomas, who’s seen multiple friends and family members shot and killed, including Harper student Shakaki Asphy, who was gunned down a year ago this month.

Ten Harper High staff members were also along on the 15-hour coach bus ride to D.C.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel stopped by the South Side school Friday morning, joining in on the national attention being paid to Harper kids.

Meeting the president was the highlight of the trip, one boy told Emanuel.

“As soon as he said, ‘Hey, Harper!’ my whole body just got weak!” he recounted.

The students said they were given a “deluxe tour,” introduced to everybody, from secret service agents to the White House chef. In addition to meeting with the president for 45 minutes privately, they got a shout out from him at an event with the Baltimore Ravens football team.

Harper Principal Leonetta Sanders says she appreciates that the First Lady has turned more of her attention to the issue of urban gun violence in recent months, and has made an effort to get to know Harper students.

“She wanted to really just have a deep conversation with them, one-on-one, and just really hear their stories. But also, at the same time, to encourage students to keep going,” Sanders said.

Many kids came home on a first-name basis with the president and First Lady, referring simply to “Barack” and “Michelle.”

Junior Sandelio Wright, who’s been shot at on his walk to school, said he was moved by the whole trip, especially a night visit to the Lincoln Memorial.

“I was standing at the exact same spot where Martin Luther King did his speech, seeing the view that he saw. And it was gorgeous. It was reflecting off the water. And just knowing that he was standing right there talking to a million people. It was beautiful. I got a picture in my phone.”

The Harper students also visited Howard University, where they met a student from their neighborhood who’s now a Rhodes scholar working on her PhD.

The trip was paid for through donations collected by Chuck Smith, a Chicago attorney at the Skadden law firm. Smith had heard This American Life’s reporting on Harper and was asked by Mayor Emanuel to raise money for the trip.

Principal Sanders, who has an unshakably positive outlook, hopes things like this trip--and the attention to her school--might slowly change the violence that has sent her to funeral after funeral for slain teenagers.

“That’s why we took a variety of students,” said Sanders. “We took Gates Scholars, but at the same time we took some challenged students, who are in gangs and who are not on the right path. And what we hope to do is that we change those students to go another direction.”

Sanders’ broader hope is that by changing students, they can change the neighborhood where those students are growing up.

Linda Lutton is an education reporter at WBEZ. Follow her @WBEZeducation

Chicago principals get more flexibility, likely less money in budget

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 07:57:00 -0500

Principals across the city may have to figure out how to do more with less money from the district next school year.

Chicago Public Schools is in the process of briefing principals on how much money they’ll have to work with as the district continues the switch to a more rigorous curriculum and implements full-day kindergarten across the city.

CPS is fundamentally changing how schools receive money. Rather than allocating specific positions and earmarked pots of money, the district will give principals a specific amount of money per student to spend as they see fit.

More than 40 district schools and the city’s 104 charter schools have been funded this way for several years. But the rates were set at roughly $6,000 per student for elementary schools and $7,000 per student for high schools.

CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll said the per pupil rates for next year will be $4,429 per student in kindergarten through third grade, $4,140 per student in 4th through 8th grade, and $5,029 per student in high school.

Carroll did not immediately know if charter schools, which have long complained about being funded inequitably, will be getting the same amounts as district-run schools. The new rates are significantly lower than charters’ previous per pupil rates of $6,070 per elementary student and $7,587 per high school student.

“We need to treat every school equitably in this process,” Carroll said in an e-mail Wednesday night when asked about the decrease in the per pupil amounts.

Magnet and selective school programs will continue to get some additional teachers and administrative positions funded by CPS to continue running the specialty programs they offer. There are also additional pots of money that come from state and federal sources for special programs like early childhood education and children in poverty. It’s unclear how that money will be distributed to schools.

A breakdown comparison is below.

FY14 rates
K-3 = $4,429
4-8 = $4,140
HS = $5,029

FY13 rates (for schools funded on a per-pupil basis)
Charter schools
$6,070/ES student
$7,587/HS student

Per pupil pilot schools
$6,969/student (0-300)
$5,845/student (301-450)
$5,077/student (451-900)
$4,531/student (>900)

Performance schools
$6,126/ES student
$7,658/HS student

Source: Chicago Public Schools FY13 Budget – Appendix B, School-Based Budgeting

Becky Vevea is a WBEZ education reporter. Follow her @WBEZeducation.