The Roar of Silence At CPS Hearing on Stewart and Brennemann
The CPS hearing on April 8, 2013 on closing Graeme Stewart Elementary School (4525 N. Kenmore) and plowing it into Joseph Brennemann Elementary School (4251 N. Clarendon) marked yet another chapter in the forms of creative resistance from targeted school communities. Faced with a "hearing" at which CPS officials would refuse to answer questions (and at which no member of the Board of Education would be present), resistance took a novel form: silence, followed by the creative use of the space provided.
As the hearing began at 5 pm, there were about seven people in the audience, three of whom were just CPS furniture. The hearing, held at Amundsen High School rather than at either of the schools on the Hit List, had begun.
The hearing officer, however, right at 5 pm plowed ahead and, after a canned introduction, invited speakers to come to the microphone.
Nobody came.
After several excruciating minutes of silence, a handful of speakers, interspersed by again long minutes of painful silence, trickled to the mic and made a few remarks against the proposed action.
One was a speaker for Stewart School, then there was the principal from Brennemann.
A few more speakers told the meeting that the reason nobody showed up at this 'hearing' was that everybody now understands how rigged they are and that CPS doesn't care anyway because they have already decided months ago which schools they will close.
But then here's where things got creative.
Stavroula Harissis, member of Chicago Teachers Solidarity Campaign and member of Uptown Uprising, described what happened.
"It was pretty powerful, the silence itself because you see the CPS officials sitting up there sort of twiddling their thumbs and waiting for a response from people. And you look around and you see the power of the silence and knowing the reason for the silence is because we know you're not listening to us anyway so what's the point of filling that silence."
In fact, at other hearings, when asked questions, CPS officials had told angry parents, teachers, students and community leaders to "Call 311."
"We just figured they aren't going to help us, right. That silence was an acknowledgement of the fact they're not listening to us. But there were people talking amongst themselves in the seats. I don't remember who it was just turned around and said, 'Why don't we just start talking to each other? They're saying they don't want a dialog so we will have a dialogue.' And then it turned into an organizing meeting. Once you hear people's stories and 'this is where I'm from' and 'this is why I'm here,' we see that we are all here for slightly different reasons."
The organizing meeting in the middle of the desolate hearing was very productive, as plans for further actions were made and a signup sheet was passed around.
By: Rod Estvan
Done deals -- and Trumbull's history
While silence may be powerful the transcript will show very few people were concerned with the closing of Graeme. I was at the hearing yesterday for Trumbull, which is actually our family home school. There were a reasonable number of people at the Trumbull hearing and they made legitimate points in particular about how CPS failed to measure the school's actual utilization because of the the fact that 8 classrooms were being used as special education self contained classrooms.
Some of the parents, LSC members, teachers, the alderman for part of the intake area, and community members seemed to a degree unaware that CPS fully understood that the 30 student per classroom measurement for self contained classrooms did not reflect the reality of the school. But how did Trumbull get to the point of having 37% of its students with IEPs?
It got to that point because as the school lost students over the last 20 years the principals asked for and got from CPS cluster programs to fill up empty space in the building. The reason the school lost population was the movement of Asian students out of Chicago as their families bought homes in collar suburban areas.
Andersonville's middle class families that bought homes largely did not send their kids to Trumbull, and that includes my own family. Apartments that once housed large Asian families became condos owned in many cases by single young adults without children. We have owned our home for 30 years, we bought it for $72,000 and by 2008 its market value rose to about $800,000 and has since declined like most property in Chicago has.
There clearly are now middle class families that want their children to go to Trumbull, but probably not enough as yet to fill up the building any where near what it was built for. So in order to keep it open the school would require having a very large percentage of special education students. So large in fact that it would be well beyond what CPS agree to when it signed its Corey H special education settlement agreement years ago which has now expired.
That leaves the question of what will happen to the building. There were many concerns expressed about that at the meeting. As at all the other meetings CPS staff would answer no questions. Really given the number of higher income families in the community it is possible a higher end private school could buy the building. It seems unlikely that a charter school would move in since one will be opening not far away. It is also possible CPS might eventually want to reopen the school as a middle class themed school, but why close it down to do that?
Rod Estvan