Released on April 9, 2012, you can find our blog post about this White Paper here. 

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!

On Wednesday, we delivered a report entitled, “High School Application and Placement for Chicago Public Schools Students with Disabilities” to the unelected CPS BOE. This 18 page report shows major barriers to CPS HS access for the most vulnerable students. For example, 31% of high schools have a minimum NWEA score requirement to apply.

See the Key Findings & Recommendations and find a link to the full report here.

Read our statements to the BOE when delivering this report here.

An education consultant, Lara Pruitt, whose children recently graduated from CPS, noticed the tremendous amount of concern, frustration and anger expressed by CPS parents about the lack of information and support provided to parents of students with disabilities on the critical transition to high school. She reached out to RYH in September 2018 to ask if we might form a volunteer group to research the issue and unearth current problems as well as potential solutions.  

RYH assembled a task force including a number of CPS parents with children who have disabilities and education researcher Dr. Federico Waitoller, associate professor of special education at UIC.

This report was delivered to CPS at the January 2019 monthly meeting of the CPS Board of Education. (Our statements to the BOE are here.)

The below infographic was published by RYH in May 2016. It reflects the reality of budget cuts at our schools.

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