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. 

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

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