How are we supposed to trust our city government when the Lincoln Yards TIF report that was given to Alderfolks was authored by a Lincoln Yards lobbyist? What does it say about our priorities when the city is able to sweep this massive conflict of interest under the rug to give Sterling Bay $1.3 billion (almost $500 million less than what is being proposed for the Invest South West initiative)? Our schools are underfunded by $1.9B.

Chicago Tribune: Aldermen relied on a study to approve $1.3 billion for Sterling Bay’s Lincoln Yards. Turns out that Sterling Bay hired the consultant who wrote it.

We would love to see what the Lightfoot Administration has to say as they clearly believed that this conflict of interest should not exist (they quietly changed the policy in the summer; now City Hall can hire TIF consultants who will report to the city.) 

Teachers voted to ratify the contract last week which officially ended the strike. The CPS Board of Ed approved the strike make up days and the CTU and SEIU contracts yesterday at their monthly meeting. 

Some more press coverage on the strike & contracts below: 

WBEZ: Teachers Strike Remakes 25 Years Of Bargaining in Chicago

Chalkbeat Chicago: Budgets, school ratings, charter schools: Side agreements to Chicago teachers contract reach for big changes

Revised CPS calendar is here. 

Action Alert, News, and Research!

Recently, CPS made mid year, school level budget cuts, totalling $46M. To see how your school was impacted, please go here. 

There are a few things happening on Monday, February 13, due to these cuts. 

On Tuesday, January 31, we delivered hundreds of letters from Illinois parents and community members to the offices of Senators Durbin and Duckworth. Before the delivery, we hosted a press conference and a rally. Our message was clear: Just vote no!

Click here to download the infographic as a PDF

Thank you to our volunteer parents who planned our wonderful forum and who prepared these excellent handouts and advocacy tools!

Thanks, too, to all of the parents, teachers, and principals who joined us tonight.

We will post a link to this page in our Special Education Toolkit for Parents which you can find here.

We were live tweeting as were a few others. See the Storify of the event here.

***In preparing for our November 16, 2017 Special Education in CPS Public Forum (more info on that here) we noticed that 2 links below are broken. You can find File D here and File E here. These documents as well as the ones below will be updated and distributed at our upcoming forum. We will post them on our website when they are ready.

Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) is doing more listening tour dates on the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) which will replace Race to the Top which replaced No Child Left Behind.
Find out more about ESSA here: http://www.ed.gov/essa
ISBE listening tour dates, locations & times here:
http://www.isbe.net/essa/pdf/ESSA-tour2-schedule-0916.pdf

Despite CPS claiming that they have made no cuts to the classroom, district schools have been cut by $179 million. The FY2017 budget adds to the pain that chronic underfunding of Chicago’s school system has inflicted. The need for long-term sustainable revenue to fund Chicago and all public schools in Illinois equitably and adequately is more acute than ever.

Thanks to the RYH Special Education committee for putting this letter together for parents to send to principals before the start of school. We hope to have this translated into Spanish in the next week.