LABOR BEAT: How Little Village protests thwarted 'co-location' plans by CPS...
A new Labor Beat video, "Little Village Stands Up To the CPS Bully" will be aired this week on Labor Beat and is also available on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/cM3XXUSEJLU. The video shows the fight against "co-location" involving Spry and Saucedo schools in the Little Village community.
The January 20, 2016 protest against the 'co-location' plan. Labor Beat photo by Andrew Friend.In January of 2016, Chicago Public Schools proposed a "co-location" plan to move Spry Community Links school into the facility already occupied by Maria Saucedo Academy and Telpochcalli school, located in the Little Village neighborhood. This proposal was supposedly made to save CPS the $95,000 in rent they were paying for Community Links at a different building. Since Saucedo/Telpochcalli was not officially "under-utilized" (CPS lingo for "not crowded enough"), parents, teachers, and students were angered by the idea. It would most likely have led to larger classroom sizes and a degraded educational quality.
On Jan. 20, 2016, at one of three hearings on the proposal, all community members present opposed the plan. A sit-in formed at the end of the meeting, which took over the auditorium for several hours and forced CPS administrators to postpone the planned co-location for a year and gather more information on class size impacts. In this Labor Beat video, Chicago Teachers Union member and Saucedo special education teacher Sarah Chambers relays the story of the victorious sit-in action by parents, students, and allies in the community. Duration 7:50
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