RYH Statements | CPS BOE Special Meeting on ESSER III | 6.16.21
You can watch the meeting here. Our live tweets are here. The #ChiDocumenter live tweets are here and their webpage with documentation is here. Our statements are below followed by press and relevant CPS links.
ESSER = Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief.
CARES Act (ESSER I) was granted in June 2020 (CARES = Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act)
CRRSA (ESSER II) was granted in December 2020 (CRRSA = Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act)
ARPA (ESSER III) was granted in March 2021 (ARPA = American Rescue Plan Act)
Jianan Shi, RYH Executive Director
Good evening,
I first addressed this appointed body two years ago. I asked that y’all set this district on the right path for future elected board members. Tonight, HB2908 was voted and passed in the House, paving the way for school board elections for the first time. While we don’t agree on many issues and approaches, there have been positive changes within this body. Just like we have worked together to improve LSCs, there is much work to improve what our school board will look like - such as supporting noncitizen voting of school board elections, which has a committee hearing this Friday. This issue was used as a political wedge to stop elections and now I hope that we will see fewer words and more collective actions towards expanding access to immigrant families.
RYH believes in community control over mayoral control. Instead of top down decision making, we believe that parents should be given actual decision making power. This is reflected in our #TrustLearningCare campaign: parents want local allocations of ARPA funds through bodies such as local school councils, with additional support and resources to communities that have been hit hardest.
Our parents also want accountability and transparency throughout this process, the Trust in TLC. One of the biggest needs that parents have named is providing compensatory services for any student with an IEP who needs it. Real remedy, tailored to their needs, not lip service. But then we look at the Student Specific Corrective Actions and Universal Enrichment Remedy process. You get the same briefs I do and it is a joke. This is what happens when there is no transparency in the process. There have been 14 SSCA remedies, no real outreach efforts, and until recently only a few actual vendors to choose from. If CPS is screwing special education families that it already screwed when it delayed and denied services in the past, how can we trust the district with the entire diverse learner population to heal from the pandemic?
We have the opportunity to transform families and the classroom, not just get back to normal. Let families lead this. We just need to listen.
Let’s have more evening board meetings. Thank you .
Cassandra Kaczocha, CPS Parent & RYH Board Member
After seeing the presentation, Cassandra created a new statement. This is what she said at the meeting:
Hello, my name is Cassandra Kaczocha. I am a board member with Raise Your Hand for Public Ed. I’m also the remote school coordinator for 3 kids in my house. Y’all I’m exhausted. This year has been hard. I had a whole pre-planned statement. But now that I’ve seen the presentation I have different things to say.
Tonight I heard a whole lot about local allocation, community decision making and professional development offerings. And I can’t understand how all of those things align with the targeted universalism you all have mentioned repeatedly tonight. You see, across our district we know our historic policy decisions have been born most inequitably by our Black students with IEPs. Having spent the year sitting next to my 8th grader, I can tell you that our diverse learners universally need so much dedicated support. Even at our highest rated schools, our Black students with IEPs were being failed before the pandemic.
Each time you make the additional supports necessary to help diverse learners optional or at community discretion, you are telling parents like me that you are ok with a system where we have to constantly educate others about our kids and fight for our unique needs.. Every time you leave things up to discretionary professional development you are telling me that we have to find time that many families don’t have to make sure the school prioritizes the development that will most benefit kids with needs like mine who are a minority in many communities.
We need automatic compensatory services.
We need targeted supports provided without our families having to fight individually.
We need to focus on our kids for whom two more years for implementation on top of the last two school years means so much lost time.
Our district has spent years failing our diverse learners. Please create more framework for a universal design approach to provide for the needs of our special education students. Please don’t leave our needs up to the discretion of individual school communities and educators. We need ODLSS to build more mandatory framework for services and supports for diverse learners. We’ve been failed so often, please don’t keep failing us.
Here is Cassandra’s prepared statement:
Good evening! My name is Cassandra Kaczocha. I’m a board member with Raise Your Hand for Public Education. I am also a remote school coordinator for 3 CPS students. Y’all, I’m here to tell you we are not ok. This last year was too much. Our neighbor was hospitalized and never returned, his house is now abandoned. The neighbor on the other side of us passed away. My sister in law, who lives with us, caught covid. We spent Christmas in quarantine. Covid hospitalized my brother in law and parents in law for weeks between New Years and Valentine’s Day. 3 weeks ago our 20 year old cousin died from covid.
Through all this, my children learned remotely, to protect our high risk 8th grader- a kid whose learning disability makes it difficult to watch a crowded computer screen for 7 hours a day. We struggled to get through this school year, focused on staying mentally and physically healthy. I hear others talk about learning loss, and I wonder how they can focus on anything but all the other loss. Lost neighbors. Lost family members. Lost confidence as grades slipped. Lost independence. Lost comfort with the outside. We are not ok. Even as I say this, I know there are others with losses much bigger. Families who’ve navigated worse alongside economic concerns and community violence. And families who’ve navigated all of those with children who have more complex disabilities than mine.
This is why we’re asking you to prioritize compensatory services and mental health supports. Every CPS student deserves to go to a school where every staff member is trained on mental health first aid. All students deserve weekly access to clinicians who can help them cope with trauma and loss. And every diverse learner requires additional services. Raise Your Hand has been engaging with families regarding our needs since before the school year began. We crafted our Trust, Learning, Care plan as families like mine were begging the district to prioritize the supports we needed to survive remote, synchronous and hybrid learning. Now that we’ve almost made it thru this year without those supports, we’re again begging the district to prioritize the CARE our kids need in order to successfully LEARN next year. This board can not begin to regain our TRUST unless the district acknowledges the losses we’ve had and prioritizes spending accordingly. Please prioritize compensatory services and mental health supports. Thank you!
Sun-Times: CPS unveils pandemic recovery plan funded by half-billion in federal relief money
UER/SSCA Resources from RYH & Equip for Equality informational sessions here.
CPS webpage: Moving Forward Together
CPS is hosting two Moving Forward Together Town Halls
Mon, June 28 | 5:30PM
Wed, June 30 | 5:30PM
Register OR watch on the CPS Facebook page