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

After a temporary CPS employee was fired, she downloaded a database containing names, employee ID numbers, phone numbers, addresses, birth dates, criminal histories and any records associating individuals with the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). Parents who were in the process of the CPS background check and school volunteer approval process and many CPS employees are saying they received an email last night from CPS indicating their data was downloaded by the former employee.

CBS 2: Fired CPS Employee Steals Personal Data Of 70,000 People, Charged With Multiple Felonies

#cpsuccess! We are still retweeting away at @CPSuccessChi. Please tag us in your #cpsuccess tweets and use that hashtag! (Note the clever spelling.) Some recent & amazing #cpsuccess stories chosen randomly from our Twitter feed:

Raise Your Hand's annual fundraiser, Raise a Glass for RYH, is this Tuesday!  Join us at Lagunitas Brewing Company on Tuesday, October 2, from 5:30 - 8:30pm.  Please buy your ticket in advance so we can plan ahead!

The unelected CPS Board of Education held their monthly meeting on August 22, 2018. Here are our written statements and links to video of our testimony. 

Thanks to all of you who came out to the student-data privacy hearing this past Tuesday in the IL House Cybersecurity Committee! There were quite a few parents in attendance and several who testified. RYH Action pushed for this hearing because they have been trying to get a simple data privacy bill passed and have come up against serious opposition from the ed tech lobby and school management groups. We believe parents have a right to know what data is being collected on our children, how it’s being used, and the ability to correct it if it’s wrong, and we don’t think tech companies should be able to profit by selling our kids’ data to entities for marketing purposes. We also think stronger protections are needed to secure our students’ data. These are just some of the data privacy issues that we’re trying to bring to light.

In a big win for IL students that comes as a result of many parents speaking to their legislators about student data privacy concerns and as a result of Raise Your Hand Action being present in Springfield and meeting with several IL legislators on this issue, the IL House Cybersecurity, Data Analytics and IT Committee will hold a subject-matter hearing on student data privacy on Tues August 7th, 10am, at the Bilandic Building (160 N LaSalle), C-600, 6th floor. 

CPS announced it would open a new 20-person, $3M department to respond to sexual abuse allegations right before the BOE meeting Wednesday. Unfortunately, this came as a surprise to the Inspector General who is supposed to be working in partnership with CPS on this issue. It’s also concerning that the legal department is in charge of launching this department, given the recent revelations that their department was routinely interrogating student victims of sexual abuse without a parent present.

Welcome to the Summer! Even as the school year wound down, there was so much CPS and public education news. We will try to keep our comments brief below and we have included many press links for you to read more. Thanks for reading & being engaged!

You have all likely seen the horrific reports out of the Chicago Tribune by now, documenting hundreds of cases of sexual assault and abuse that have been reported to CPS over a decade but have never been made public before. The Trib said they had to threaten to sue CPS to get them to reveal the data they possessed, and it turns out CPS lawyers have investigated over 430 cases of sexual assault or abuse by CPS employees since 2011. These are just incidents that have occurred in CPS school buildings that have been reported. CPS acknowledged in the Tribune that they had no formal policies or procedures in place to deal with this, or to give schools firm direction on what they needed to do in the event that a student made a report.