The Chicago Board of Education is expected to renew the campus agreement for Urban Prep charter schools located in Bronzeville and Englewood after a judge ruled that CPS violated its moratorium on school closures by attempting to take control of the schools.
Education
Following the Thanksgiving break, faculty members represented by the Columbia College Faculty Union (CFAC) have entered the fifth week of the ongoing strike.
“Most tragically, students of color and students from low-income households are dramatically more likely to be in districts with high vacancy levels, more than twice the vacancy rates than the rest of state,” said Robin Steans, president of Advance Illinois.
Last week, the Northwestern Prison Education Program graduated its first cohort of students. The graduates are the first in the country to earn bachelor’s degrees from a top 10 university while incarcerated.
Evanston residents are getting a new neighbor: an $800 million rebuilt Ryan Field. Evanston City Council on Monday voted yes on the field revamp and on a controversial zoning change to allow concerts.
Officials at the Illinois State Board of Education say they’re receiving more requests for increased funding for next year than the state could possibly afford, and they’re bracing for the possibility that budgets will start to tighten in the near future.
The man’s brief tenure as an officer ended after he testified as a witness in a sexual assault case for the defense without informing the city. He worked for years at schools including Yates and Amundsen as both a coach and a security guard before his suspension.
The $800 million proposal to revamp Ryan Field has been controversial from the very beginning. The plans call for a new state-of-the-art stadium that will be smaller in size than the nearly century-old structure it would replace, moving from a capacity of 47,000 to 35,000 for football games.
The move to table the measure until next Monday allows more time to negotiate and consider a community benefits agreement with the university.
State lawmakers left the capitol on Thursday without finalizing a plan to put in motion the 2021 law that seeks to diminish mayoral control over Chicago Public Schools. Competing plans from the state Senate and House are cause of the delay.
Donors receive state income tax credits for their contributions to the Invest in Kids program, which helps some 9,600 students across Illinois attend private and trade schools. But barring last-minute legislative action, authorization for the program runs out at the end of 2023.
The end to mayoral control of the Chicago Board of Education could come sooner than expected.
A year from now, Chicago voters will for the first time decide who will run the city’s schools. But first, Illinois legislators have a lot of decisions to make about how that process will work. Chief among their responsibilities is dividing Chicago into 20 districts.
Elementary and secondary students in Illinois showed consistent improvements in their reading and math scores while the state’s high school graduation rate reached a 13-year high for the most recently concluded school year.
October marks 60 years since nearly 250,000 CPS students and their parents flooded the streets of Chicago in what’s known as Freedom Day — a massive protest of segregation in Chicago Public Schools and the superintendent at the time, Benjamin Willis.
Nearly 600 part-time faculty members at Columbia College walked off the job Monday. The faculty union and administration have been contract bargaining since May.
