M E D I A  R E L E A S E

More than 125 Chicago-area Attorneys Sign “Letter of Conscience” Against Massive Chicago Public School Closings

Public interest law community expresses outrage, urges more equitable, inclusive and strategic approach

For More Information:

Patricia Nix-Hodes (708) 218-2320; Amy Smolensky, (312) 485-0053; Jill Wohl, (773) 562-0159

May 17, 2013, Chicago – 128 Chicago-area lawyers with an estimated combined 2000 years of distinguished experience and leadership working towards justice and equity in education, health, housing, employment, economic security, safety, discrimination, citizenship, juvenile justice, and civil rights signed their names to a letter urging a halt to the Chicago Public School’s proposed closings and consolidations of 54 schools – the largest school action of its kind in the nation – in less than one year.

Titled “An Open Letter Seeking Justice in the School Closing Crisis,” the letter will be delivered to Mayor Emanuel, CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett and Board of Education Chair David Vitale on Monday, May 20, 2013, and requests a response to be directed to Paul Strauss, who offered to sign the letter on the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law letterhead without hesitation.

“The attorneys signing this letter cannot, in good conscience, stand by and remain silent as the Board of Education moves to vote on this potentially disastrous course,” says Strauss, “Closing this many schools in such a poorly-planned and uninclusive manner marks a dangerous precedent. It sets the civil rights in education movement back decades.”

Child advocate Stacey Platt (773-732-2554), one of the attorneys who joined the Open Letter comments “It is a sad injustice for the children and families of the City of Chicago that neighborhood schools –which parents value and children need most of all–are neglected and closed and parent voices ignored.”

The letter cites the Illinois School Code and research criticizing the outsized move to “right size” the District, specifically, that the law of the land squarely asserts that “the primary responsibility for school governance and improvement is in the hands of parents, teachers and community residents at each school.” [5/34-18.43(a)(6)] The letter also highlights the racial and economic distribution, number of homeless students, and students receiving special education services who will be adversely affected by the proposed school actions, which will be voted on by the Board of Education on May 22, 2013.

Highlights of the Open Letter:

“[If carried out, these actions] will dramatically alter the school environment for vulnerable elementary students. More than 47,500 elementary students will be affected including more than 3,906 students experiencing homelessness and 2400 students requiring special education services. No such massive school closure has been attempted in the history of our City or our nation. This alone must give all reasonable people pause.

[T]his massive undertaking is being executed in advance of the delivery of a 10 year school facilities master plan, as required by Illinois law… As the saying goes, measure twice, cut once. Closing schools before sharing a clear, well-thought out plan for the City’s educational and economic future signals a perilous lack of accountability from our public administrators.

Overwhelmingly and almost exclusively, the communities of Chicago targeted for massive school closures are those on the City’s South and West Side: communities that are dramatically impoverished and predominantly comprised of African Americans. Such disparity is at best unsettling and is, indeed, provoking racial and economic divisiveness. Tensions run high before the actual closures have even been approved.

The proposed removal of so many schools from impoverished communities of color has been read as an ominous statement on the prospects of those living there. It only adds to the distress and despair, creating a feeling that the City is disinvesting where economic growth and stability is so important –and that we are a City divided.”

The letter coincides with a three-day citywide march protesting the closings, and comes at the same time that numerous community groups, media outlets, local aldermen, state and county legislators and even CPS’ designated hearing officers are expressing opposition and grave disappointment in the lack of strategy, meaningful inclusion, consistency, equity and adherence to requirements throughout the planning and public vetting process conducted by CPS.

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With the help of the wonderful CReATE members Diane Horwitz and Ann Aviles de Bradley, PURE is putting on a press conference next Tuesday, the day before the May 22 school closings vote, to present the concerns of child mental health experts about the negative impact of school closings on children.

Here’s the press alert we just sent out:

Press Alert May 17, 2013

Contact:

• Julie Woestehoff, Parents United for Responsible Education. 773-715-3989
• Diane Horwitz, Chicagoland Researchers and Advocates for Transformative Education (CReATE). 847-332-2756
• Ann Aviles de Bradley, member of CReATE; Assistant Professor, Northeastern Illinois University. 773-339-8479
  

Child mental health experts raise serious concerns

about the impact of proposed mass school closings on children

Who/What: Social workers, counselors, and child mental health professionals from prominent Illinois and Chicago organizations and universities will present statements of concern about the negative impact of school closings on Chicago students social-emotional health, and will identify needed actions. Among those speaking will be

• Dr. Erin Mason, President of the Illinois School Counselors Association.
• Dr. Francisco X. Gaytan, Assistant Professor, Social Work, Northeastern University.
• Dr. Cassandra McKay-Jackson, the Jane Addams College of Social Work, University of Illinois-Chicago.
• Erika Schmidt, Director of the Center for Child And Adolescent Psychotherapy of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.

Their statements will be delivered to the members of the Chicago Board of Education for their consideration prior to the school closing vote on May 22.

When: Tuesday, May 21, 2013, 10 am

Where: Room 244, Auditorium Building, Roosevelt University, Michigan Avenue and Congress Parkway.

Why:The proposed school closings and consolidations will affect as many as 47,000 children in mostly low-income, under-resourced communities. Mental health experts know that these children and their families are already disproportionately affected by the cumulative effects of multiple stressors, impairing students’ ability to engage positively in school. Their expert research and experience substantiate the concerns raised by thousands of parents and others at school closing hearings for the emotional well-being, safety, and social adjustment of our children.

Our City, Our Schools, Our Voices, will come together this coming weekend in the final protest push before the May 22 Board meeting where the mass school closing vote will be taken.

Here’s what the CTU says about this event:

The mayor and Board of Education want to destroy 54 school communities. This will be the largest destruction of schools in U.S. history. We need our neighborhood schools and we should all fight together to save them. Join parents, teachers, students, public school workers, clergy, activists and others in the three day citywide march across the city. They want to divide us. But this is our city, our schools, and together, we’ll use our voice to tell the mayor and the world that we intend to fight back.

The march is organized into south and west sides.

South side 10:00 a.m. Saturday Kickoffat Owens Elementary, 12450 South State Street

West Side 10:00 a.m. Saturday Kickoff at Lafayette Elementary
2714 West Augusta Avenue

Register now for updates and information.

When it come to class size, research shows that less really is more.

Raise Your Hand Illinois came to prominence in the spring of 2010 with their “Say No to 37″ campaign, a protest against CPS plans to balance the budget by raising class size.

Now RYH is sponsoring a petition against the Chicago Public Schools space utilization formula used to declare dozens of schools “underutilized” and therefore in danger of closure this year. According to this formula, 36 children in a room is considered an “efficient” use of space, i.e. you can have 36 students in every homeroom in CPS and not be considered overcrowded. RYH charges that many of CPS’ plans for closings will lead to overcrowding next year.

The petition asks CPS to revise their space utilization policy.

For Public Schools Action Tuesday (a day early) please sign and share their petition.

I am sharing this letter from Joyce Feilke, a school counselor in Austin,Texas. Joyce reached out to PURE with this powerful letter, which she has sent to two Texas state legislators. Joyce has a Masters in Counseling and Psychology from the University of North Texas, and has been a school counselor since 1980.

We are asking other mental health professionals to speak out similarly on behalf of our children whose mental, social and emotional health is at serious risk due to the corporate reform scourges of school closings, high-stakes testing, and other so-called reforms.  Please share Joyce’s letter, and help us reach out to more child development and mental health professionals for more testimony, letters, research, and other resources. Parents especially need to know more about what is being done to our children in the name of school reform.

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COPY SENT TO STATE SENATORS: JANE NELSON & KIRK WATSON 4/16/2013

Dear Senator Kirk Watson, Educators, & Medical Professionals,

I am writing to request your help in changing our current school obsession with testing. I believe the impact it is having on the mental health of the younger children in Texas has reached a level of crisis. I think we need an Education Task Force for crisis intervention.

For the past 30 years, I have worked as a counselor in some of the best schools in Texas, most recently in Austin ISD and in Lewisville ISD prior to that. I have had ongoing professional development in all areas of childhood mental health issues. I have also served as 504 Coordinator and Gifted & Talented Advocate in AISD. I have many years of expertise in recognizing early symptoms of childhood social/emotional disorders. Counselors are in the schools for that purpose, to identify needs early and help get intervention in place before it progresses. Most mental illnesses have their roots in childhood before the age of 14.

What I have observed in the schools over the past 30 years has led me to write this letter and advocate for a Texas Task Force for Education. I believe we have reached a level of crisis.

The gradual changes that I have observed during my 30 year career could be compared to the science experiment of putting a frog in tepid water, then gradually turning up the heat: we have now reached the critical level, and we recognize that the frog is not going to jump out.

My professional opinion of the overall school environment throughout Texas is that it has reached a level of Institutional abuse that is harmful to our children’s mental health. I believe we can call it psychological abuse and neglect.

These are some of my observations:

The current test obsessed environment in Texas schools has become rigid, boring, inflexible, data driven, and unemotional. There is a deficit of empathy and compassion for children’s social/emotional needs. There is professional ignorance about the impact this is having on young children’s mental health.

The primary emphasis is on PERFORMANCE and intellectual development, with a total lack of social/emotional development.

The Testing Obsession creates ongoing stress that diminishes the creative and imaginative spirit of the teachers. Teachers and administrators have become robotic and scripted. They have lost spontaneity and imagination and creativity just as the children have.

Administrators have become narcissistic and obsessive. They measure their personal success on their school’s test performance, while the children’s distress and soaring diagnosis of anxiety related disorders and depression either goes totally unnoticed, or is blamed on a dysfunctional family.

Administrators have learned to play the “504″ game, where any student who performs below acceptable on practice tests is recommended to see their physician for ADHD evaluation and medication, then the medicated child can FOCUS better and get into the 504 Program.

FOCUS means sitting in a desk for 6 hours a day without physical activity except for a 30 minute lunch and 15 minute recess. This often includes after school tutoring until 4:30 for more test drill as well as boring homework. Another name for FOCUS is TORTURE.

TORTURE: In addition to sitting still at a desk for 6 hours, it includes eating bad processed food in the cafeteria, breathing poor quality, stale, germ-infested air in a closed up building, and shutting down any inspirational thoughts of imagination, creativity or humor. It means becoming a robot: loss of spontaneity and imaginative play, depersonalization, dissociation are our obvious clues. These symptoms, which are now so apparent to those of us who recognize mental illness early, are sending up the red flags of distress.

Diagnosed disorders in young children are increasing at alarming rates, and not just in Texas. One school district has reported a 260% increase in the number of young children diagnosed with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). ADHD, Anxiety Disorders, Depression, Mood Disorders, Conduct Disorders, and learning disorders all fall under that umbrella as well.

An ADHD diagnosis will allow a child to have special 504 accommodations and extended time on the STAAR test. I have observed that many of the clinics in east Austin that cater to the lower socio economic families will give a diagnosis of ADHD upon parent request. Many administrators think ADHD medications are steroids for the brain. They do not see that children as young as kindergarten 5 year olds being unnecessarily medicated may contribute to a life long dependency or addiction.

The current system is not preparing our children to be socially and emotionally healthy. Those are the two primary areas of development that will determine their future success more than any thing else, including performance on tests and ability to sit for long hours bubbling answer sheets as objects for data collection.

Young children’s bodies are supposed to be moving more than sitting. They need time for imaginative play and sensory activities. They need unstructured time to allow their curiosity and creativity to blossom and their imagination to develop. They need opportunities to sing, and dance, and play a musical instrument, and laugh, and have fun with learning. They need to be inspired. However, the school environment for young children has become a paradox. We are doing the exact opposite of everything that research tells us is healthy for young children !

What is now taking place in our schools is a form of PSYCHOLOGICAL EROSION.

It diminishes the spirit of a child.

Our 2^nd graders have two consecutive days of 4 hour tests to help build “test stamina” for the 3^rd grade test. This is in addition to year long daily timed drills in math which only seem to increase the anxiety and stress, and help with the dumbing down process and the fear of failure which now hangs over each child like impending doom.

This is what is happening throughout our schools. Instead of social and emotional growth, we are seeing emotional regression, dissociation and constriction. Their social/emotional health is being sacrificed for exclusive intellectual development which is being measured obsessively.

Harvard Health predicts that by the year 2020, the greatest challenge to the health care system in America will be Depression. They are shining a light on our current crop of elementary school age children.

We could almost make a flow chart to show the process of psychological erosion in our schools:

As in all cases of abuse, it begins and continues with CONTROL:

K-1: Children are over controlled with rigid scheduling and curriculum.

2-3: Children are bored and become anxious and fearful and signs of ADHD.

4-5: Children become more bored, anxious, fearful, angry, depressed and/or aggressive (most serious bullying starts here).

By middle school, these early onset symptoms increase into more destructive or self destructive behaviors along with their hormone changes and peer pressure.

Our young children are exhibiting signs of emotional abuse and neglect. Their symptoms are universally ignored. They are not being inspired to use their imagination and develop their true self. They have lost spontaneity, imaginative play, and humor.

Continued boredom progresses to frustration, continued frustration progresses to repressed anger, continued repressed anger progresses to depression (inward) or aggression (outward). The most frustrated and anxiety disordered children are those with higher intelligence. They are unconsciously suffering ongoing grief for the tragic loss of their gifts which diminish with each passing day. Their anger has the potential to reach a Sandy Hook or Columbine level of aggression.

Could we speculate and ask some questions?

Why has there been such a dramatic increase in ASD (formerly Asperger)? 1 out of 54 boys and 1 out of 88 girls and 50% undiagnosed.

Why has there been such an increase among young children in all the related secondary disorders that go with ASD? Anxiety, Depression, ADHD, eating disorders, Mood Disorders/Bipolar, Learning disorders, self harming behaviors.

Why do we have ongoing increase in childhood obesity and diabetes?

Why do school crisis such as Columbine and Sandy Hook seem to result from intelligent students whose social/emotional needs were neglected? If it is torture for an average student to sit through 6 hours of boring, rigid, test obsessed curriculum, consider the frustration of an intellectually gifted student.

The schools might argue and say, “We have programs for social/emotional learning. We have programs for Gifted & Talented.” That is simply window dressing.

Our children are being used for collecting data, for enhancing the financial gains of testing companies, for STAAR trophy banners hanging on school buildings. Our children are smart. They know they are being used, abused, and neglected, and they have a right to be angry.

They are NOT being given a safe haven, a place where their social and emotional development can be nurtured, and where they can be inspired to love learning, to develop their imagination and their own great ideas, and be accepted and valued for their unique self instead of a test score.

While families have been more stressed as a result of the ongoing economic woes and social stress in general, our schools should have been there to provide even more emotional support for the children. It has been the opposite: More stress at home, more stress at school.

Several years ago when I was a counselor at Marcus High School in Flower Mound, we had regional meetings with Plano ISD to study the high suicide rate. At that time Plano was called the “teenage suicide capitol of the world”. The most significant facts that came from those meetings, other than the sensationalism, was that the a large percentage of students in that region were trying to live up to high expectations (school & family), but were lacking in emotional support (high mobility, professional working parents, large school population, lack of extended family and social isolation and other emotional support networks were not there for them). That same depersonalization is epidemic among our young school population now.

I believe our elementary school environment is helping to create the perfect storm to bring about Harvard Health’s dire prediction for 2020: Depression will be our greatest challenge to health.

When a child’s mental health becomes secondary to an institutional need for performance recognition, academic rigor, politics, professional ignorance, professional narcissism, and denial, then it has failed in its most critical mission. Our most precious resource, our children’s health, is rapidly becoming an ecological nightmare in Texas, and probably across the nation. .

Our “industrial schools” have become to education the equivalent of what “industrial chicken or pig farms” have to food. Money, politics, greed, ignorance, and denial will continue to diminish the health of our children until we make some dramatic changes.

We need Crisis Intervention now! We need an Education Task Force made up of people who understand the problem and have the means to make changes. We need to look at the model from Emilo Reggio Village in Italy after WWII when their children had suffered trauma from the war. They realized that in order to preserve their most precious resource, they needed to create schools that nurtured the children’s social and emotional health. Our young children are exhibiting the those same symptoms of PTSD, but it is more damaging because it is betrayal trauma from authorities they should be able to trust. It is ongoing traumatic grief from the loss of their greatest childhood gifts: spontaneity, imagination, humor, and security.

For young children, this feels hopeless.

Sincerely,

Joyce Murdock Feilke, Counselor
Blackshear Elementary School
1712 E.11th St
Austin, Texas 78702
512-414-2021

What Local School Councils can do to challenge

the misuse and overuse of standardized tests

Learn more about standardized testing.

• Check out the More Than a Score web site for resources to share with your school’s parents, teachers and community. Share the MTAS fact sheets, “What Parents Need to Know about High-Stakes Testing,” in English and Spanish.
  
• Download user-friendly fact sheets about a wide range of testing issues on the FairTest web site, on the testing resources page of PURE’s site, and from CReATE, a collaboration of local university researchers.

Hold a parent and/or community meeting where people can talk about testing. Ask teachers, education experts, More Than a Score or other group representatives to speak, and invite your local newspaper (see FairTest’s media toolkit for pointers)

Vote to sign the National Resolution on High-stakes Testing, and/or vote on your own resolution. Join the more than 80% of school boards in Texas and dozens in Florida and other states that have passed resolutions challenging high-stakes standardized testing, along with 11,000 individuals and 400 national organizations. Sign on to the National Resolution here: and/or vote on your own resolution (suggested versions here, a shorter one here and an even shorter one here).

Send or bring a copy of your adopted testing resolution to your local, state and federal legislators.

Pass the More Than a Score petition in English and/or Spanish in your school. Your can also sign our online petition here. 

The petition asks CPS to:

• Eliminate standardized testing in grades K-2nd grade and greatly reduce it in all other grades.
• End the use of standardized testing data to evaluate students and teachers and close schools.
• Fully disclose the cost, schedule, nature and purpose of all standardized tests.

Get more involved with More Than a Score:

• Send an LSC rep to our meetings and attend MTAS forums and events.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
  
• Join our MTAS list serve here.

Consider carefully any budget expenditures for test preparation materials and programs. Your school’s discretionary funds are precious and might be better used for enrichment programs and other areas of learning which may have been reduced due to the pressures of standardized testing.

See more at www.morethanascorechicago.org.

You can download a pdf version of this LSC tip sheet here.

This one isn’t remotely humorous.

Press release *** For Immediate Release

May 3, 2013

Contact: Elaine K. B. Siegel, David Corral – 312-583-9970

Teacher lawsuit v UNO Charter Inc to proceed

Whistleblower exposed unsafe UNO policies that led to locker room sexual assault

Chicago, IL – In what amounts to a David v Goliath victory, the United States District Court, Eastern Division, ruled Wednesday that a lawsuit by teacher David Corral against his employer, UNO Charter School Network, Inc,. should proceed to a jury trial.

Mr. Corral brought the lawsuit against UNO, claiming that he was fired for blowing the whistle on unsafe policies that resulted in a student sexual assault.

David Corral was the physical education teacher and athletic director at UNO’s Dr. Hector P. Garcia, M.D. High School. In 2008 and 2009, Mr. Corral ran the high school physical education classes by himself.. Boasting an “extended day,” UNO had double periods of physical education. Yet UNO did not even have a gym for Mr. Corral’s first year, and part of his second, at UNO. To hold class, he had to take the students – a coed class of 50 students – back and forth to a park several blocks away, weather permitting. (In bad weather, the students were stuck in the building and did activities like running up and down the stairs.) When Mr. Corral warned that this arrangement did not allow for adequate supervision, UNO did not respond.

The students had to change from their three-piece school uniforms into their gym clothes. There was no one but Mr. Corral to supervise both the boys and the girls during the changing period. Garcia High had no locker rooms until November of 2009.. In the meantime, the girls used a classroom that looked out onto a factory. The factory workers complained to UNO that they could see the girls while they were changing their clothes.

When the locker rooms finally opened, they were inadequate, and badly designed. One could see from the boys’ into the girls’ locker room, an error that Mr. Corral caused to be corrected.

During the changing periods, Mr. Corral was supposed to supervise both the boys’ locker room and the girls’ locker room, as well as the students who came into the gym for class. At the same time, he was supposed to enter attendance into his computer. When Mr. Corral warned that this arrangement did not allow for adequate supervision, UNO refused to modify the schedule or provide assistance. Yet UNO was aware that there had been discipline problems in the boys’ locker room.

There was no way for a student to call for help from the locker room, except to shout. A student who was unable to yell (for example, because he was ill or being subdued) could not get help.

A few weeks after the locker rooms opened at Garcia High, Mr. Corral discovered an incident of bullying in the boys’ locker room. Upon investigation , it turned to be a sexual assault. The victim stated, “I felt assaulted – if I didn’t fake it, it would have gone further. I felt like I was being raped, when someone gets on top of you and you want them to stop but they don’t.”

The police came and arrested two of the perpetrators.

UNO turned the investigation over to a nun, Sister Barbara, UNO’s Director of Academic Affairs.

UNO fired Mr. Corral four business days after he discovered the bullying. At the meeting where he was discharged, he told the UNO administrators that “there is absolutely no way that I could – that I could supervise boys’ locker room, girls’ locker room, and all the students that are in the gym.” He said he was being fired for reporting a sexual assault, and that one of the perpetrators had disciplinary problems and should not have been allowed back into the school. Sister Barbara covered her ears, and said, “I can’t hear that, I can’t hear that.”

Having terminated Mr. Corral, Sister Barbara continued her investigation, until the victim’s mother decided not to bring legal action.

Since UNO fired Mr. Corral, he has never been able to find work anywhere else.

Mr. Corral brought this lawsuit in federal court against UNO, claiming that UNO fired him to retaliate for whistle-blowing. He alleged that UNO’s actions violated both state and federal law. In 2012, UNO claimed that no evidence supported Mr. Corral’s claims, and moved for summary judgment, i.e., UNO asked the court to throw out the case.

On May 1, 2013, the court denied the motion for summary judgment. The court held that Mr. Corral had presented evidence that requires a trial by jury to resolve the case. It cited, in its decision, Illinois law that “demonstrates the importance which society has placed on the reporting of child abuse.” The court ruled that a jury could decide in favor of Corral, that he was fired because he “was speaking up about UNO’s policies (or l ack thereof) to prevent the type of sexual assault that occurred” in the UNO locker room.

Read the full court order here.