CPS School Board Meeting / Lincoln Park High School Council Meeting:
Coming from a very small community on Long Island in New York, I had no idea what to expect of my first Chicago Public School Board Meeting. From the protestors outside the building to the seemingly never-ending line to what I thought was going to be the actual meeting but was actually a viewers’ room set up with chairs and flat-screen televisions. I shouldn’t complain though- not everyone made it even that far into the meeting (ahem… Adam and other stragglers).
In my past experience, the democratic process has tended to work in favor of the party asking for change, or the party most affected by the policies at hand. I remember during my youngest brother’s last year in high school, the school decided to raise tuition $5,000 without warning or any gradual incremental increase. Many parents were upset but my mother was the only parent who allowed to local newspapers to interview her and use her name for quotes. They ended up working out a system for current (at the time) and graduating students, since it was too late for my brother to be transferred to another school before graduation.
My point being, I have always been able to put faith in the democratic system, or at least have hope in the idea of democracy when it came to both the public and private education systems I grew up with. If the voting didn’t go in my parents’ or my favor, at least we could visually see the evidence of a democratic system in place with the actual number of votes and voters, etc. The CPS School Board Meeting, on the other hand, felt more like a monarchy with a questionably selected group of kings asking the general public’s opinion then cutting them off mid sentence and eventually disregarding the said opinion and making their own decisions anyway.
Understood, there was an influx of people wishing to speak on behalf of themselves personally, or as concerned parents or teachers or students, etc. so there simply just was not enough time to address every single person’s every bullet point. The way in which each speaker was cut off and told to wrap up not once but several times during their obviously planned and rehearsed speeches was embarrassing. I literally felt myself blushing on more than one occasion and couldn’t pinpoint if I was reacting with empathy for the speaker or with horror at the way they were being treated in this so-called democratic setting.
One of the main issues that seemed to consistently come up was the idea of an extended school day for CPS. The idea being that in light of the current test performance and graduation rates, a longer period of scheduled time spent in the classroom will result in greater positive student outcomes. Parents who spoke seemed to be the only hesitant parties addressing this issue, they seemed mostly concerned about the effects of a longer school day on extracurricular activities as well as the question of whether this proposed extra time spent at school will actually have positive results in their children’s lives.
An interesting parallel to the CPS School Board Meeting was the Lincoln Park High School Council meeting, consisting of parents and teachers in a very much smaller setting discussing a variety of concerns and topics regarding Lincoln Park High School or their children/students specifically. A hot topic during this meeting was how to get students, seniors specifically, to arrive at school on time and/or at all. Questions of commute issues versus general motivation were brought up, defended and debunked. Most of the individuals on the panel and many of the parents seated around me believed that a later start to the day would solve the problem of students being late or skipping their first period class entirely. They also considered incentives such as free prom tickets, which it sounded like teachers had been handing out in an effort to get better grades and attendance in general from the students.
After researching the concluding plans and set dates for the CPS extended school days I looked up Lincoln Park High School to see if anything had become of their meeting afterwards. In response to CPS Chief Executive Officer Jean-Claude Brizard’s letter regarding the extended school day starting in the fall (“with a 75-minute early release one day a week”) Lincoln Park High School stated on their website: “This planned change will allow us to build on one of the cornerstones of Lincoln Park's excellence-collaborative planning time for teachers. The announced plan is for High School students to get out of school 75 minutes early each Wednesday. We will write an appeal to allow students to come to school 75 minutes later on Wednesdays, rather than leaving school early, similar to our current Thursday late start schedule.”
I am not yet aware of how appeals work with individual schools addressing CPS but many of the flaws of the current CPS system became evident to me over the course of this class. I know that I haven’t begun to touch the surface of understanding it all, but I definitely hope to attend more of these types of forums to better understand what I am getting into as an educator and hopefully as a permanent resident of Chicago.
