Adam Parrott-Sheffer (District 10)

Section 1 - Basic Information & General Questions

Candidate's Name Adam Parrott-Sheffer

District 10

Campaign link:  www.adam4chi.com

Are you a current or recent CPS parent, grandparent, or guardian/caregiver? CPS Parent

Are you a CPS graduate? No

Have you ever served on a Local School Council (LSC)? Yes

Have you ever served on a Parent Advisory Committee (PAC)? Yes

Have you ever served on a Bilingual Advisory Committee (BAC)? Yes

Have you ever served on a Community Action Council (CAC)? Yes

Have you ever worked in a CPS school? Yes

How long have you lived in the district you are running to represent? almost 20 years

Describe your CPS experience. 

I am a current CPS neighborhood school parent, a former CPS educator, and an award-winning principal with two decades experience with our schools. These days I volunteer at my neighborhood school where I have supported recess, staffed a reading room, organized field trips, coached sports, and designed and taught programming for refugee students and their families. I also support Chicago principals with building their leadership teams. This summer I presented at the Chicago Principal Summer Leadership Institute on improving feedback practices and supporting teachers. Finally, I elevate and celebrate the stories of our educators as an author. I am currently writing a third book that shares the practices of our south side high schools to create communities of care with their youth. My experience with CPS spans from the classroom to the community to the city and it is informed by deep knowledge of national and international education practices. I bring this big picture through hyperlocal practice perspective to the board.

Why are you running for the Board of Education? 

It matters to me that our board consists of Chicago Public School parents who have experience creating the conditions for powerful learning and have improved large bureaucracies. That is my story. I am a 4th generation Chicagoan and a proud public school parent who has spent 20 years making our schools work better for all kids. I am frustrated with the experiences our students with disabilities and multilingual learners have in our schools and I know we can do better. That starts with a board committed to transparency, accountability, and increased communication. I want to deliver on that promise for each and every child who walks through our school doors.

What is the most pressing challenge our district is facing? 

The most pressing challenge our district faces are the unequal outcomes for young people across the city- particularly for students with disabilities and youth from Black and Brown communities on our south and west sides that have dealt with generational disinvestment. Too many young people leave our schools too early or without the skills that will empower them to unleash their full potential. We must tackle this challenge in the face of structural budget shortfalls, enrollment declines, decaying buildings, and too frequent violence that takes too many young people from us too early. We need schools to be joyful places where young people engage in powerful learning that develops mastery, taps into their creativity, and centers and develops their identities. This is the work.

Section 2 - Board Responsibilities & Commitments

How will you interact with CPS students and families in your district to ensure that the voices of the most impacted are heard and understood?

Too many of our elected officials hold events at times and in locations that are a hardship for folks. I believe the work of a board member is to show up where people already are. This means hanging out in school cafeterias and talking to students. It means standing in the school pick up line and listening to parents. It means attending the events where people go like school sporting events, arts performances, and community celebrations. 

This proactive approach can then be enhanced with data. Board members should use information to connect with the folks most marginalized by our system. This could be families who have attended the most number of schools or the students with the highest absences or suspensions or complaints about special education services. We need to be in community with and learn from those who are not experiencing our schools in a positive manner. 

Communication is defined by what the listener hears, and not what the speaker says. This means that engagement opportunities must be shared multiple times in multiple formats. There should be written and spoken versions in all languages used in our community. We should mail updates and use social media. We need to have live events where people can connect and learn together. Too much communication in our district is passive and families have to work hard to learn what is going on. 

What specific actions will you take to address and repair the historical harms within Chicago Public Schools, and how will you ensure that students, parents, and educators are actively engaged in the healing and trust-building process?

The second part of this question is what makes the first part impossible to answer until the work begins. Those who have been harmed by our system should steer the healing process. Our job as a board is to help create the container where this can happen and ensure the ideas elevated are treated seriously and acted upon. 

There are communities who have done this work well and we can learn from them. Durham schools in Canada have made significant repairs through their Black Excellence efforts and the reconciliation work with indigenous youth in British Columbia could be models for starting our efforts.

What is your understanding of the Board’s relationship with Local School Councils? How will you collaborate with LSCs in your district?

As the representative bodies closest to our school communities, LSCs should be the drivers of district policy and vision. This will require deeper investments in training, member recruitment, and authority. A school board member should attend LSC meetings in their district, listen, and provide regular updates to LSCs that members can weigh in on and provide feedback. Our LSCs and CACs are the structures that, if healthy, will ensure the success of the board in delivering its promises to our young people.

List the Board committees you intend to join and describe any new Board committees you will propose.

This will depend on the ultimate membership of the board. I believe you go where you are most needed. I would hope to serve on committees where I can elevate student voice & agency, ensure we make evidence-informed decisions through cycles of learning and adjusting, and support our CEO through performance feedback from the community.

How will you prioritize your time to ensure you give your role on the Board of Education the attention it deserves?

I am fortunate to have the support of my partner and a job that is flexible and part time. As a volunteer who already works to spend 8-10 hours in CPS schools each week, this will be a natural progression of the time I give to service with our young people.

Section 3 - Budget & Facilities

What are your thoughts on the current proposed district budget for SY24-25? As a board member, where would you look to increase funding and where would you make budget cuts?

Any budget built upon short-term predatory loans is unacceptable. We need a budget that actually answers where the resources for all expenditures are coming from. In a challenging budget situation we need to protect classroom level investments. This means curricular resources, teacher salaries, time for collaboration, and teacher learning. Our cuts should come from central office and programming that cannot demonstrate positive impact on kids’ learning.

Funding for CPS is in a particularly precarious situation due to state shortages to Evidence-Based Funding (EBF), the end of pandemic funding, and more. What would you prioritize when facing these overwhelming budget realities?

We need the state of Illinois to deliver on its financial promises to all school districts. This means working with the other communities who have not received the funding necessary for an adequate education to champion state budgets that prioritize investments in education. We also need to curb TIF funding and prioritize reinvesting those resources in our schools. As these changes will not be enough to address all of our structural challenges, we will also need to engage local school communities in conversations about how to protect classroom level investments and which district level investments are least effective.

What experience do you have with complicated budgets?

I have managed multi-million dollar public sector budgets with funding streams coming from Federal, state, local, and nonprofit sources.

What will you do to ensure equitable and transparent funding for neighborhood schools?

Budgets should be transparent and provided to schools earlier. We should provide our budgetary information in a format that is easy to analyze and process. We should then ask for help from citizen data scientists to help us find places where our fund can be more effectively distributed. Ultimately we have to look at results and invest more resources in places where our kids are not getting the education they deserve.

Many parents have expressed an urgent need for capital improvements in their schools. What steps will you take to ensure that schools have functioning facilities, particularly bathrooms and water fountains?

As a parent whose kid was sent home with his head bandaged up because a bathroom tile fell on him, this issue is personal for me. Our buildings are designed for another era and a type of education that was designed to let many kids fail. We need buildings designed for 22nd century Chicago learning. 

I think this is an opportunity for us to invest in our neighborhoods with new buildings. If we work with local communities to build new schools as community hubs that include space for libraries, parks, and community organizations, we can address our failing structures while committing to more equitable investments in our neighborhoods in a cost-effective way. 

Bussing challenges have a long and fraught history in CPS. The last few years have been particularly difficult for special education students, as well as those who attend magnet and selective enrollment schools. Given CPS’s recently announced plans for the coming school year, How do you plan to address the ongoing school bussing challenges and ensure that all students have reliable, safe, and equitable transportation to and from school? 

We need to increase pay for bus drivers and expand our recruitment efforts. There are likely opportunities for “grow your own” bus driver programs where we work with parents to become our future bus drivers. 

However, bussing is ultimately a short term solution. We need to work with other city agencies to improve our public transportation options and make them available free to CPS students and their families. A world class city should have world class public transportation and effective public transportation is accessible and convenient for people with disabilities. 

Section 4 - Educational Programs & Academic Success

How do you define a quality education?

Each student has access to rigorous, joy-filled learning. Each student feels respected and celebrated for who they are. Student outcomes are not predictable by demographic data. Students are prepared to lead as citizens in an advanced democracy.

What is the role of the Board of Education in ensuring quality educational programs for all students regardless of their background, zip code, or school type?

This is the north star of the board. The board achieves this aim by: 1) creating the container for community to define the vision of our system of schools, 2) defining what success looks like in measurable ways, 3) hiring and supporting a CEO to realize success through progress updates and feedback, 4) communicating to the community the current state of implementation and listening and responding to feedback.

What are your views on the roles of neighborhood, selective enrollment, magnet, and charter schools within CPS? Please address each type of school in your answer.

While it needs to be strengthened and made more equitable, our system of choice is an asset. Kids are different and having multiple choices of schools means that all schools are not set up for failure trying to be all things to all young people. I am less interested in debating the merits of any type of school than ensuring that all kids have options and that all schools are excellent at what they do. There is no difference in the role of any of these ‘types’ of schools. Their role is to meet the needs of the learners who walk through their doors. The role of the board is to ensure schools are doing right by kids, families, and educators.

How should the Board approach charter oversight and accountability?

Charter schools and neighborhood schools should be held to the same standards in terms of academic outcomes, student & family experience, staff retention & working conditions, and financial oversight.

The initial recommendations of the Black Student Success Working Group were shared earlier this summer. Which of those recommendations will be most important to incorporate into the district’s strategic plan and why?

The recruitment and retention of Black educators and leaders is critical to our district’s success. Having a teacher of the same racial identity over one’s academic career increases one’s likelihood of graduation and other positive life-outcome indicators. For Chicago Public Schools, this is less an issue of recruitment and more about incorporating into the district strategy the working conditions and supports that help Black educators remain in their roles and advance in their careers.

How will you work to ensure special education assessments and placements are more timely and equitable? 

We need to shift from a “wait-and-fail” model of identification where kids are already behind to a demonstration of need through a proactive “response-to-services” model. Structurally this is hard to do because kids across a school have to have IEPs requiring a certain number of minutes before teachers are allocated. We could use a population-based allocation model that assumes a certain level of services are needed so that the resources are already in place before the young people arrive. We also need to have appropriate staffing of counselors, psychiatrists, and related service personnel.

What should the Board board do to guarantee students are receiving all of their required IEP minutes?

This is a failure of monitoring and reporting. The board needs to make this a standing agenda issue. We also need to expand past whether or not minutes are met and focus on whether kids are receiving a quality education. Minutes are a bare minimum. Are kids successful when compared to typically developing peers and how do students and their families feel about their educational experiences? Answering these questions should be our focus.

In 2021, even before the recent influx of asylum seekers, the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) put CPS on a corrective action plan because the district was out of compliance with bilingual education requirements. To date, CPS still fails to staff bilingual programs and certified bilingual teachers at all schools that need them. What steps would you advocate for the district to take to solve this problem?

I was the principal of a school serving kids speaking over 30 languages from over 70 countries. Our focus should be on designing a school system that embraces each student as a multilingual or future multilingual human being. 

We need to increase our recruitment efforts of multilingual educators through our university partnerships and by developing future teachers from our paraprofessionals and families. 

We need to commit to every student leaving CPS speaking multiple languages. This requires investing in more elementary school language positions. 

How would you advocate for the reinstatement of comprehensive art, music, and library programs to our schools? 

Arts programming should be available to young people before, during and after school. It should be integrated into the core subjects of math, reading, science and social studies. We have strong arts educators who are critical voices in making sure the entire school day is lively with arts infused instruction. We have a robust Chicago arts community who can help expand our offerings. We must see our arts education standards as just as important as other other academic standards and monitoring student learning in supportive ways.

Section 5 - School Culture

What do you believe is the role of the Board in fostering a culture of belonging for every CPS student?

Creating schools where each student feels respected and celebrated for who they are is a key priority for our school board. The board should work with the community to set priorities around belonging for youth and adults. The board’s role is then to ensure that the organization makes progress on those priorities and hold the CEO to communicating progress and adustments the organization is making when it falls short.

What are specific steps you will propose to increase in-school mental health support for our children? 

We need integrated social and emotional learning with strong advisory programming. We also require adequate staffing of counselors and social workers.

What policies do you propose to help stop bullying in CPS schools?

Bullying is intolerable in all of its forms and I am skeptical that we can solve bullying with policy. Resolving bullying requires changes in culture. Things I have seen work are increased bystander training and resources along with restorative practices led by victims of bullying. We need to support schools with designing and implementing locally created solutions.

What specific steps will you take to address and reduce racial bias in our schools, both in terms of pedagogy, curriculum, and disciplinary practices?

The board can support this important work through requiring curriculum audits and feedback from students, families, and educators. Additionally, discipline data and consistent disaggregation of results by race is an important lens through which evidence should be reviewed.

Students who report sexual assault and violence in CPS schools often feel that their voices are not heard. What is your approach to ensuring meaningful accountability and what will you do to ensure that this type of violence stops?

The first step is to ensure the implementation of an age appropriate comprehensive sexual health curriculum so that all young people and the knowledge and skills they need to be safe. We then need community partnerships and anonymous reporting structures to provide youth with the resources they need when they are impacted by sexual violence. We must lean our community experts to help us create the conditions where no student experiences sexual violence.

How do you plan to ensure that LGBT+ students are protected and supported in CPS, both in anti-discrimination policy and inclusive curricula?

I am the only candidate in District 10 who has named building a truly inclusive community for LGBTQ+ youth and educators as a priority. LGBTQ+ youth and educators need a seat at the table with the development and impact of policy. We need to ensure our curriculum at all levels includes the voices and perspectives of LGBTQ+ youth.

Is there anything you would change about the recently adopted Whole School Safety plan? What can the Board do to ensure its implementation?

Clearer and more transparent updates on implementation, progress monitoring, results, and adjustments as we learn more through implementation.