Thank you to our volunteer parents who planned our wonderful forum and who prepared these excellent resources, sample forms and advocacy tools! Thanks to all of you who came out to know your rights, get your resources, and share your stories. 

We will post the below resources and sample forms in our Special Education Toolkit for Parents which you can find here.

If you missed the forum, you can watch the video here.

By law, CPS must publish Draft Guidelines for School Actions every school year by October 1st. Once published, CPS provides a public comment period. This year's comment period ended on October 20 at 5:00pm. At this time, CPS is reviewing the submitted comments. They may or may not revise the published Draft Guidelines. The Final Draft Guidelines will be used to determine school actions. On December 1st, CPS will announce school actions.

The below comments were submitted to CPS by RYH on Friday, October 20, 2017.

In 2013, RYH parents embarked on an ambitious research project studying what education experts say is important for schools and school systems to be successful. In 2014, we summarized our findings in a handy parent guide, A Guide to Talking About High-Quality Education: What do all kids need for strong schools? When the guide was released, we hosted a Saturday morning event where Pasi Sahlberg, author of Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland, addressed parents, teachers and community members in Chicago.

Thank you to Joy Clendenning for presenting our statement to the unelected Board of Education hearing on the CPS 2017-18 budget. This was presented at the 12:30pm hearing on Wednesday, August 23. Please note that the actual recorded statement may differ slightly from this version.

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.

Remarks as prepared for the October 21, 2016 Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force (CEFTF) general meeting and school actions committee meeting, presented by Jennie Biggs on behalf of Raise Your Hand.

Comments on CPS Draft Guidelines for School Actions 2016-17

In 2013, the Chicago Board of Education voted to close 49 elementary schools and reassign their students to receiving schools. Despite reported capital investment in receiving schools, enrollment dropped at a much steeper rate at these schools than other elementary schools.

Chris Ball, CPS Parent and Raise Your Hand board member, and Cassie Creswell, Raise Your Hand Action Co-Director and board member, collaborated and submitted these comments on the Draft Illinois ESSA Plan. We are very grateful for their work.

The comments are below. To view the statement with references, please go here.

The citywide parent group, Raise Your Hand, has worked for an entire year on a research project studying what education experts say is important for schools and school systems to be successful. The findings are summarized in a handy parent guide.

Download our parent guide

Parents/Guardians want their children to become life-long learners, problem-solvers, self-confident individuals and active participants in our democracy. Learn how to ask the right questions about your school and how to talk about high quality education with our guide on "What do all kids need for strong schools."