Good friend, longtime PURE member, and DePaul education professor Marie Ann Donovan wrote this timely message about the current Chicago Public School budget mess:

"Picture CPS principals on the rooftops of their schools, wetting their pointer fingers, sticking them out into the wind to tell its direction.Then picture them doing this every half hour. That's about what it feels like to be a CPS principal--'Stay tuned' is their mantra. They turn off their Blackberries at midnight and when they turn 'em back on at 4:30am (because they can't sleep due to worry, anyway), there's been a change or other amendment to what they're to do. That's what it's like to be a CPS principal these days in terms of trying to figure out how to lead your school in the coming year.

"I'm growing more concerned about the planned rise in 'combined-grades' [not to be confused with multiage or ungraded] classrooms, due to the teacher layoffs and increased class sizes. I heard from a number of CPS principals just yesterday that many of them/those they know are resorting to this come fall.

"Here's the thing: Principals are holding off on notifying teachers about their staffing plans simply because they're holding out hope that funding will get restored. I appreciate their concern--for it truly is one--and applaud them for their continued fighting with Central Office to get more $ support in their schools.

"If you're a teacher of a certain grade level and you learn in mid- or late-August that you're going to be teaching 32 kids from two different grade levels, that doesn't give you a lot of time in which to prepare/learn the other curriculum. You wind up scrambling the days before school opens, and the week the students return, just to figure out who's who and 'where' they are in terms of their next learning steps, based upon their test scores from spring (=old data, let's face it) plus your expert judgment of children's learning needs. THEN you have to scramble to quickly sort 'em all out into their learning groups so that by Week 5 you can administer the required District curriculum-based tests (half of which you'll now have to create from the new curriculum you're teaching, due to the other grade-level's children in your room). What do you get? I fear not a whole lot of learning--through no fault of the teacher or the kids or the parents.

"I also fear this will be the proverbial 'final straw' on teachers' backs--and we'll lose some fine folks in our system."

What can we do? Join the CTU for a community summit on the CPS budget, Saturday, July 24, from 11 am to 12:30 pm at Ariel School, 1119 East 46th Street. More here.