Rogelio Lopez, An East Side CPS counselor, gives “Latino Voices” La Ultima Palabra on what he says is the most daunting part of bringing change to your community.
Education
A new student loan debt relief plan will cancel up to $10,000 in federal loans for individuals making less than $125,000 a year. For low-income students who received Pell Grants, they can receive up to $20,000 in student loan forgiveness. According to research by Excelencia in Education, 50% of Latinos in higher education receive federal Pell Grants to help pay for college.
The average bus trip districtwide is 39 minutes and over 80% of rides are under an hour, according to CPS CEO Pedro Martinez, but 365 diverse learners currently have rides lasting more than 90 minutes each day.
As part of the Green Schools Project, schools engage in project-based challenges to develop and implement creative, low-cost, sustainable practices. Those schools receive resources and support from the Illinois Green Alliance to collaborate on a year-long project which they can present at the end of the school year.
Starting this school year, every public elementary school and high school in Illinois must include a unit of instruction on Asian American history. Illinois became the first state to implement the requirement when Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History Act into law last summer.
School, city and state leaders celebrated Sunday with the Catholic nun who became something of a folk hero as chaplain for the Loyola men’s basketball team that reached the NCAA Final Four in 2018.
Monday marks the first day of the 2022-23 school year, as some 300,000-plus students head back to class on one of the earliest start dates in recent memory.
As school starts back up, students especially rely on the internet for everything from research to turning in their homework. But for some of those students, reliable internet access is still tough to come by. A few area programs are looking to change that.
“The science is pretty much supporting all the changes that CDC is doing,” said Dr. Geraldine Luna, medical director at the Chicago Department of Public Health. “The reports of cases at school have been lower and we expect them to continue to be the lowest as we vaccinate children and send them protected to school.”
Researchers found that Muslims in Illinois were the youngest and most diverse faith community in the state and the country. The sample in the study were racially and ethnically diverse. The study also includes specific recommendations for educators, elected officials, Muslim community leaders and more on how they can better meet the needs of Muslim communities.
The Big Ten announced Thursday it has reached seven-year agreements with Fox, CBS and NBC to share the rights to the conference’s football and basketball games. The deals go into effect in 2023 and eventually will allow the conference’s member universities to share more than $1 billion per year, a person familiar with the terms told The Associated Press.
While many schools will offer classes for credit to prison inmates, Northwestern University says its the only top 10 school that grants degrees to prisoners. And next spring, students at Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison in Will County, will be the first to receive their bachelor's degrees from Northwestern while in prison.
The Chicago Welcome Back Center launched Tuesday at Richard J. Daley College and will serve as a resource center for individuals trained internationally in health care fields who are working to receive licensure in the U.S.
A report by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows a 5.4% drop in the head count of Latino undergraduates in fall of 2020. And for the first time in 20 years, the number of Hispanic-serving institutions of higher education dropped from 569 in 2022 to 559 in 2021.
The teachers say they were encouraging students to participate in the process of free speech by protesting metal scrap company General Iron, which planned to move into their South Side community.
More than one in five New York City elementary schools had fewer than 300 students last school year. In Los Angeles, that figure was over one in four. In Chicago it has grown to nearly one in three, and in Boston it’s approaching one in two, according to a Chalkbeat/AP analysis.
