LSCs under attack — Community members, parents, politicians and educators respond to the threat
“Every school district in the state of Illinois other than CPS is elected. One of the biggest problems in Chicago and CPS is that the Board isn’t elected.” – Anthony Travis, Kenwood and Washington High School Local School Council representative.
According to Anthony Travis, the effort by the Chicago Board of Education to destroy Local School Councils is based on its desire to undermine democracy and impose business mandates upon communities without their consent. One of the issues brought up repeatedly at the April 12, 2008, Kenwood Oakland Community Organization’s (KOCO) annual convention was the Board’s lack of accountability since it was appointed by Mayor Daley in 1995. For Travis an elected school board (as it was prior to Mayoral control) “would be accountable to the people in the community and by being elected by the people some of the decisions they would make would be different.”
At the event held on April 12th, over 150 people packed into Kenicott Park to hear testimony from LSC reps and their advocates. The testimonies dealt with the imminent threat posed to LSC’s by the proliferation of charter schools and the ongoing probationary status designated to neighborhood schools by CPS. Johanna Brown, the former community representative at Inter-American Magnet elementary school, warned that the 200 schools on probation are set to double to 400 by next year whereby the Board can dissolve their LSCs. For Brown once those schools “are only accountable to the AIO (area instructional officer) they [CPS] will not pay attention to the community.”
The longest testimony by far was provided by Audrey May, the Chicago Teacher’s Union Executive Assistant and Coordinator of Community and Clergy Relations. May spent more than 20 minutes in front of representatives from Teachers for Social Justice, Parents United for Responsible Education, Designs for Change and state representative Esther Golar. During her speech, May said that Renaissance 2010 was designed “to strip the power of the people at the community level and hand it over to corporate interests.”
However the CTU representative never offered any logistical or financial support for the movement to retain LSCs and ignored the demand for an elected school board. This was despite the fact that members of the House of Delegates voted in favor of an elected school board in the March meeting. In addition, May claimed that the union had “lost hundreds of teaching positions.” The CTU membership roll declines since 1997, when the proliferation of charters began, number in the thousands. Despite the large number of community members in attendance along with parents who were deeply invested in their schools, the CTU only sent one representative, who spoke vaguely about its commitment to democracy and solidarity.
Other speakers demanded that a law be passed to require any school in Chicago getting tax dollars to have an elected LSC with full control of the budget. Anthony Travis also called for the elimination of all AIO positions, which is “wasting $3.4 million” annually that could be better spent on security and truant officers.
Ron Holt, the parent of slain student Blair Holt and LSC representative for Julian High School, implicitly attacked school closures saying that “a student should not have to go extra miles to pay exorbitant fees to get an education.”
Not all the comments lauded current LSC leadership; former Englewood High School graduate and parent Etta Davis addressed the need to “eliminate LSC members from positions where they hold that seat but never show up.”
Parents also criticized CPS for crippling schools through the appointment of incompetent administrators. Wanda Hopkins, a parent advocate for PURE, said that “CPS is responsible for putting those bad principals in” and argued that people must take TIF discretion away from the Mayor and reinvest the money into neighborhood schools.
Professor of Education at UIC, Pauline Lipman received applause when suggesting that “no schools should be closed without the authorization of the LSC.” If you want to support this movement go to http://www. pureparents.org/ to sign a petition in support of an elected school board.
This article was originally published in the print edition of Substance for May 2008. Copyright Substance 2008 All Rights Reserved. Please see our monthly Staff and Policies Statement for terms of reprints and other usages.
