Blocks Together and RYH hosted a 1 1/2 day event on Friday, July 12, and Saturday, July 13. We learned more about best practices in planning for school facilities and programming from local experts and from national expert Mary Filardo, Executive Director of the 21st Century School Fund. Below are the resources shared during the event and many more. 

We are grateful to Crossroads Fund who supported this event! We also want to thank Alexios Rosario-Moore for all his work organizing the agenda, materials, and workshops!

Earlier in 2019 we shared the exciting news about staffing transitions in RYH and RYHA as both organizations grow. Earlier this week Raise Your Hand began the search for our next Executive Director. Now we need your help.

The window for the IL Assessment of Readiness (IAR) opens Monday, March 11. Use this weekend to review our 2019 Toolkit for Standardized Testing and Opt Out to learn more about this “new” assessment and how you can #ChooseToRefuse #ZombiePARCC! 🧟 The three main resources are now translated into Spanish: Q & A, Notification Letter of Refusal (scroll to p. 2), and Refusal Cards- all three can be found in the Toolkit.

At the February 27, 2019, unelected CPS Board of Education meeting, RYH delivered a parent research report entitled Improving Nursing Care in Chicago Public Schools: Creative and Meaningful Solutions Left on the Table. You can find the report here.

Below are the prepared statements from three RYH parents who delivered the report and explained the need for a complete overhaul of the CPS nursing design system. The fourth prepared statement below includes several questions from RYH on various CPS issues such as the ARA meetings, an overhaul of SQRP which hasn't involved parents, and implementation of a new IL CPS facilities law. 

You can find 3 videos of our speakers, plus a video of the CPS BOE and Central Office discussion after our 3 speakers here.

Congratulations to the NTA community on their historic victory; NTA will remain open as an elementary school! For details see #1 in our "public ed news this week" list below.

On Wednesday, City Council's Committee on Education and Child Development finally had a hearing "to address issue of sexual abuse and safety of children in Chicago Public Schools." You can find our thread of live tweets from the 3 hour hearing here. We spoke at the hearing and you can find our prepared statement here.

Please join us tonight: Parent Training: Know Your Rights on 504 Plans vs. IEP Plans! Details and RSVP here.

We sent this out as an email blast this morning. Sign up to receive email newsletters from us here.

Chicago Public Schools has a new report called the Annual Regional Analysis (ARA).

There are meetings to present this report to people in various regions of Chicago.

You can go and see how CPS is talking about our schools.

UPDATE 3.23.2019: CPS shared their Notes from the meetings with us. You can find links to the Notes shared with us via this pdf.

This week’s RYH email newsletter brought to you by the letters S, Q, R, and P!