RYH Statement | March 2019 CPS BOE

We attended and spoke at the March 27, 2019 monthly meeting of the unelected CPS Board of Education meeting. Our prepared statement is below. You can find our live tweets from the meeting here.

Before the meeting, we participated in a press conference with parent leaders from across the city and from various community-based organizations. You can find the media alert here, video of the press conference here, and statements from the press conference here.

Jennie Biggs, CPS Parent & RYH Communications & Outreach Director

Here’s our list:

1. We now have a Parents’ Guide to Dealing with Bullying on our website. The toolkit’s first section helps families navigate the CPS Anti-Bullying Policy.

2. During Emanuel's tenure we've tracked $500M removed from schools. The “$32M investment” messaging is NOT lost on parents who have been hustling to fill budget holes imposed by the egregious school-level cuts this unelected BOE has approved year after year.

3. Shame on CPS for voting yes on the Lincoln Yards TIF, diverting $477M from CPS over 23 years.

4. You’re also selling out students to tech developers. Why are you hiding the CZI contract behind your non-profit, Children’s First Fund? This is especially concerning when many of your new “program investments” tout personal learning without transparency about what that entails or evidence of efficacy.

5. This morning we gathered with CPS parents from across the city calling on the next mayor to implement community-centered equity. CPS cannot have equitable outcomes without an equitable process — which means the students and families experiencing the greatest disparities in our district must have meaningful decision-making power in defining the future of their schools.

6. Let us not forget the harm done to students due to the denials and delays of special education services. We call on CPS to address this more aggressively and get the students and families the compensatory services they are owed.

7. We at RYH work to get more money for our schools and we also push for the insufficient funds that do exist to be spent well. This flashy booklet about a 5-year vision feels like a slap in the face to parents whose schools routinely run out of copy paper and other supplies by this time of year.

8. Both mayoral candidates promise to end Student Based Budgeting-- we hope the “equity fund” is only necessary for this year’s budgets since Emanuel’s appointed BOE has failed to heed parents’ desperate pleas to end the failed SBB experiment.

This is the last school board meeting before Chicago elects a new mayor. We hope the candidates are listening.