WBEZ | Education

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.

Student chefs to serve mayor lunch, compete nationally

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 07:51:00 -0500

Five Chicago high school students are cooking up a gourmet lunch for Mayor Rahm Emanuel today, before they head to Washington D.C. to compete in a national cooking competition.

The “Cooking up Change” competition, put on by the Healthy Schools Campaign, asked students to create a meal using only ingredients available in their school cafeteria.

In November, Washington High School students took the top prize in the Chicago competition with a dish they call “Chicken Rancheros, Elotes and Fruta de Tropico.”

On Monday, they will go up against Bruce Randolph School (Denver, Colo.), Sandalwood High School (Jacksonville, Fla.), West Adams Prep (Los Angeles, Calif.), Craigmont High School (Memphis, Tenn.), Valley High School (Orange County, Calif.), Beaumont Career and Technical High School (St. Louis, Mo.) and The Career Center (Winston-Salem, N.C.).

Vanessa Arnold, a junior at Washington High School, said it took a lot of experimentation to come up with a winning dish.

“We started off with a bunch of things that we didn’t know what we were doing with and we really didn’t like,” Arnold said. “This is our home cooking, this is from our culture. We took what we thought we knew best and made it into something that we wanted and we liked and we thought other people would like in our lunchroom.”

Her classmate, Mariana Nava, also a junior, said the limited ingredient list was a challenge.

“It was hard because you can’t use salt or butter and everything tastes good with butter, but it doesn’t always have to be a fat to be good,” Nava said.

Both Nava and Arnold want to go to culinary school when they graduate, but they said the culinary program at Washington is popular among a lot of students.

“Everybody has to eat and you’re going to learn how to do it the right way here,” Arnold said. “Even if you don’t want to do this for the rest of your life, you have this behind you in order to do anything that you want.”

CPS offers culinary arts programs in 20 of the city’s high schools serving about 2,200 students. About 85 percent of students who go through the program end up in industry-related careers or go on to post-secondary education, said David Blackmon, the head of CPS’s Hospitality and Culinary Arts programs..

He said students who go through the three-year program get the chance to work in some of the city’s top restaurants, including Rick Bayless’ Frontera Grill and Bill Kim’s Urban Belly, and annually, students receive about $1 million in scholarships to attend culinary schools, iincluding Le Cordon Bleu, Washburne Culinary Institute and The Culinary Institute of America.

The winning recipes created by students at Washington and other high schools across the country will also be served at the U.S. House of Representatives cafeteria next week.

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

Chicago Public Schools new pension headache

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 01:59:00 -0500

After Illinois lawmakers rejected a plan for Chicago Public Schools to delay pension payments, the District’s budget problems may have gone from bad to worse.

Three years ago, the Illinois state legislature gave Chicago Public Schools what critics called a ‘pension holiday,’ where the district could reduce payments owed to its retirement system. That’s set to expire at the end of June, meaning Chicago’s schools will have to make room for an extra $400 million in its budget to pay for teachers’ pensions.

CPS could have avoided writing that check by getting Illinois lawmakers to give them a longer timetable that would gradually increase pension payments over the next several years. This fiscal year, Chicago Public Schools is paying about $200 million toward its pensions. If Springfield takes no action, that number would jump to $600 million next year for pensions. The school system’s budget is a little more than $5 billion.

“We’re looking at how this will affect us,” said Kelly Quinn on Monday, a spokeswoman for Chicago Public Schools.

Quinn wouldn’t say if the school system is looking at layoffs, cuts to programs or a tax increase to pay for the $400 million if lawmakers don’t return to Springfield and agree to a plan.

On Friday, the majority of state representatives voted against a bill that would’ve given Chicago Public Schools some of the relief from pension payments that it was seeking.

“This is by far the worst bill of this session,” said State Rep. David McSweeney, R-Cary, during the floor debate. Many House Republicans said the state is in no position to allow another government agency to skip pension payments, considering Illinois’ pension problems.

The proposal lawmakers rejected would’ve allowed Chicago Public Schools to pay $350 million to its pensions in its next fiscal year, then $500 million the year after that.

“Sometimes we have to make some very difficult decisions,” said State Rep. Elaine Nekritz, D-Buffalo Grove, who sponsored the legislation. “I keep saying we have to make decisions between bad and worse and I think in this instance we have to pick bad.”

Laurence Msall, with the fiscal watchdog group The Civic Federation, said Illinois lawmakers never should’ve allowed CPS to not make pension payments in the first place.

“They’re going to have to do significant cutting,” Msall said. “They’re going to have to reduce their personnel. They’re going to have to make very difficult decisions.”

Complicating matters is Illinois’ own pension payment problems. On Friday, Gov. Pat Quinn released a statement saying he wouldn’t sign the bill giving Chicago Public Schools its pension ramp, unless lawmakers also approved a pension reform bill that affected state employees.

Tony Arnold covers Illinois politics for WBEZ. Follow him @tonyjarnold.

CPS registers 75% of students at closing schools, but parents concerned with transitions

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 00:50:00 -0500

Chicago Public Schools is scrambling to get students at closing schools enrolled in new schools as soon as possible.

Last week Thursday, only about 50 percent of students at schools slated for closure had registered elsewhere. But a huge last-minute surge brought that number up to 75 percent, with some schools making significant leaps.

In 36 hours, West Pullman went from having 45 percent of its students registered to 100 percent registered. A clerk at West Pullman said she made lots of phone calls and grabbed parents during drop-off and pick-up to get them to registered by Friday evening’s deadline.

But about a dozen parents protesting outside Lafayette Elementary Monday deemed the enrollment push a “devastating registration mess” and lambasted CPS for giving parents just over one week after the vote to pick a new school.

“So far we have received nothing but a rushed registration that has caused chaos,” said Rousemary Vega, whose four children attend Lafayette. CPS spokeswoman Kelley Quinn said Friday that parents can still register students throughout the summer.

One parent at the protest, Latrice Jamison has a daughter at Robert Emmet Elementary School, and said she has not enrolled her child at a new school. Yet, according to CPS figures, Emmet has registered 100 percent of its students. A clerk who answered the phone at Emmet Monday said all of their students have registered. When asked specifically about Jamison’s child, the clerk, who identified herself as Ms. Thomas, said Jamison did register her child.

The Monday protest, organized by the group Parents 4 Teachers, drew attention to two issues that have been prevalent throughout the closure process—what will happen to special needs students and whether or not students will be going to higher performing schools.

Transitioning students with special needs

According to numbers released by the district Monday, 100 percent of students in special education cluster programs have been assigned to a new school.

But that contradicts Kathleen Consalter’s experience. She has a fifth grade daughter in the autism program at Lafayette and said Monday she still doesn’t know where her daughter will go to school next fall.

Consalter said she was referred to Lowell, but when she went to register, the people in the main office had no idea what she was talking about. They said Lowell doesn’t currently have an autism program.

“I’m very worried, but at the same time, I won’t enroll her in a chaotic school and I won’t enroll her in a school that doesn’t have a program established,” Consalter said.

A CPS spokeswoman said students in Lafayette’s cluster program have been reassigned by central office to receiving school Chopin Elementary or nearby Lowell Elementary. There is not currently an autism program at either school, but next year, officials say, there will be two classrooms at Chopin and three at Lowell. The district’s Office of Diverse Learner Supports and Services is training the staff at both schools on how to work with autistic children.

The district’s special education cluster programs—which are programs that offer self-contained rooms with strict size limits—may not only change because of the school closures. State education officials are talking about eliminating the class size limit on self-contained special education rooms. Currently, self-contained rooms cannot have more than eight students (or 14, if a teacher’s aide is present).

If the class size limits for special education are removed, CPS would not be legally required to have designated self-contained rooms at receiving schools for special education cluster programs.

Higher performing schools?

Less than a day after the Board of Education voted to close 50 public schools, parents were sent a letter saying they could enroll in any district school that has space.

But parents protesting Monday said that isn’t the case.

“I would love to send my child to a higher quality school where they have all the proper resources they’re promising us,” said Magdalene Thurmond, who has a child at nearby Duprey Elementary. “They’re not doing it. They’re turning us away from the Level 1 schools.”

The designated receiving school for Duprey students is De Diego Elementary, which is currently on probation. Both are Level 2 schools, the middle CPS performance rating, but Duprey is not on probation. Thurmond wants a higher-performing school, but said the ones she’s called have said they don’t have space.

A number of neighborhood schools do keep waiting lists and may not be accepting students from outside their assigned attendance boundaries. But Thurmond and other parents said some of the most coveted schools do have “empty seats” if you apply CPS’s utilization formula.

According to district data, there are 2,000 “empty seats” at about a dozen of the district’s coveted magnet and selective enrollment schools. But CPS says the deadline to apply to those schools passed in December and the schools have finished enrolling students by now.

Erica Clark, a CPS parent whose children attended magnet schools, said the district is unfairly holding different schools to different standards.

“If you call one of these schools, they may say, well we can’t take these kids because we have extra rooms for library and art and we have a special science lab,” Clark said. “That’s all fine. We want every school to have that. The problem is these schools have those things too. And those things weren’t taken into consideration for schools that were put on the chopping block. It’s fundamentally unfair to hold schools to different standards.”

A CPS spokeswoman said at least two of the schools the group named—Kershaw and Davis—are still taking applications because they didn’t have enough applicants during the regular magnet admissions process.

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

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