New! Whole Child Committee meets Monday. SQRP is the focus. The first meeting of the CPS Board Of Ed Whole Child Committee will be held on Mon, Jan 27, 5:30-7:30pm, at Englewood STEM HS. You can register or sign up to receive updates here. Here is the letter that came from board member Rome: English; Spanish. And from an email: The focus on our first meeting will be on SQRP [School Quality Rating Policy] as the CPS seeks to engage community members to create a policy that is more responsive to stakeholders. Recommended SQRP reading before attending the Whole Child Committee meeting: Chalkbeat Chicago June 26, 2019: Chicago school board approves new school ratings scale despite complaints and confusion and July 9, 2019 Chicago is changing its elementary school ratings. Here’s why educators are watching closely. CPS SQRP web page | RYH resources from What Makes a School Great? Feb 12, 2018, including South Side Weekly coverage: Beyond the Levels Continue reading

The Mayor Lightfoot appointed CPS Board of Ed held their monthly meeting on January 22, 2020. RYH's Parent Liaison for Special Education spoke on our behalf and on behalf of the ~3500 students who use Augmentative and Alternative Communication or “AAC” devices in CPS, as these students are being underserved. You can read her prepared statement below and watch video of her speech here. A thread of our live tweets are here. We have listed press coverage far below. (Before the monthly CPS BOE meeting, we attended the CPS Finance & Audit Committee meeting. Our live tweets are here.)   Continue reading

We need your Special Education questions!  RYH is working on creating an online resource to help families navigate Special Ed in CPS and would love for you to fill out this survey in English and Spanish. Please share this survey with your contacts! Continue reading

Welcome back! 2020 will be a year full of parent advocacy!  Continue reading

To all of you who have supported our work and have been part of this critical education movement… THANK YOU!!! We have met our challenge grant and are very close to our end of year fundraising goal. Because of your support in one of our best fundraising years so far, we are able to hire a part time parent organizer in 2020. We are so close to being able to immediately hire someone for 20 hrs/week instead of 10 hrs/week. Help us double our impact.  Continue reading

At the December 2019 monthly meeting of the CPS Board of Education, five students from Kellogg Elementary spoke about the need for investment in their school's facilities. You can read their statements at the links below. You can watch them speak one after another here, starting at 1:05:00. Kudos to these students for their advocacy! #StudentVoice! Continue reading

Mayor Lightfoot and CPS announced yesterday that they will “...begin a community process to identify potential opportunities to further strengthen school funding.” They created a School Funding Working Group and will be convening public meetings in January and February 2020 so you can offer your thoughts and ideas on the way CPS funds its schools. Check out these articles from Chalkbeat Chicago to learn more: Announcement, Working Group members, and public meeting schedule: Here’s who will be leading Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s charge to reexamine Chicago school budgeting Background piece on the issue: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot promised to spend more money on students in need. Could change be imminent?  And definitely related to Student Based Budgeting… class size: As Chicago’s class size crackdown begins, schools that are ‘overenrolled by choice’ could face admissions changes Continue reading

Below is RYH's prepared statement. You can find our live tweets here. CPS now live streams monthly Board of Education meetings on their YouTube channel. You can find video of the fill meeting here, RYH speaks at 57:40. We've posted video of our statement on our YouTube channel here. Press coverage of the meeting is below. Continue reading

Thank you for your #GivingTuesday support and closing out a strong 2019 with us! Thank you for considering Raise Your Hand in your end of year giving if you have not yet donated. We are looking to bring on more staff in early 2020 to address significant LSC parent rep shortages. If we can raise $2,000 more by the end of the year, we would be able to start right in January. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! 😍 Continue reading