Current Temperature

CHICAGO WEATHER

Thursday, July 24, 2014

HuffPost - 'This Is Are Story': Chicago Public Schools Are Failing

WOW, we see more public school bashing here.

"This Is Are Story" - this article states this is a theme for the senior class at Robeson High School. See something wrong with this short statement. Yeah one glaring one we should all know especially since a conjugated verb is substituted for a similar sounding determiner pronoun.

Either way this story is about the CPS and the statistics regarding our school system that doesn't make it look very good:
Four out of 10 CPS freshmen don't graduate.
91 percent of CPS graduates must take remedial courses in college because they do not know how to do basic math and other schoolwork.
• Only 26 percent of CPS high school students are college-ready, according to results from ACT subject-matter tests.
After you completely read this is public education more of a holding cell and should it be used more as a launching pad?

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

WBEZ: CTA overcharges kids to get to summer school, job programs

WBEZ/Linda Lutton
As often stated I don't have children yet. It would be unacceptable that CTA and CPS hadn't adequately einsured that students still get reduced fare to get back and forth between home and their schools. Especially during the summer session as indicated in this recent article.
In what appears to be another stumble in the city’s transition to the new Ventra fare-collection system, thousands of young Chicagoans are paying more in train and bus fares than they should be this summer.

Typically, students under age 20 going to summer school or jobs programs would pay reduced CTA fares—currently $0.75 per ride and $0.15 for a transfer.

But many have gotten a rude awakening this summer when they’ve used their student cards on buses or trains.

“I swiped it, and I had (added) a dollar. Usually a dollar is good for me to get over here, but it said ‘insufficient fares,’said student Cesar Fierro in the hallway of his high school, Noble Street College Prep. Fierro rides on a student Ventra card he purchased at school.

He’s been paying $4.50, every day, to get to and from summer school—if he has the money.

“Like yesterday I had to walk all the way home,” said Fierro. That’s a 4.5-mile hike, from Augusta and Milwaukee to Fullerton and Kostner.
 And while school officials attempt to solve this issue, they seem to get the runaround:
School staff at Noble Street say they’ve “easily” spent 10 hours on the phone over the last two weeks trying to get reduced fares for summer school students— “calling back and forth to Ventra, being sent to CTA, the CTA saying, ‘Go back to Ventra.’ It seems to be a very confusing time for the companies as well as the schools,” said Noble Street administrative assistant Nicole Baily.
...
CTA spokeswoman Lambrini Lukidis says that’s because reduced fares are for students enrolled in an educational program, not for all youth. “If you're enrolled in the regular fall term, once that term finishes, the entitlement on the Ventra card is turned off automatically,” said Lukidis.

For students to get reduced fares during summer, schools must submit each student's individual transit card ID number to the CTA (or to one of Ventra's subcontractors). Lukidis says the transit agency has been working since spring with schools to prepare for the summer session. She says 5,500 Chicago Public Schools students and 9,500 students from charters and private schools are already receiving the reduced fare.

“So we have mechanisms in place for this to work successfully, and it has,” says Lukidis. She blamed Noble Street's problems on a "miscommunication on how to activate and get all of those entitlements processed."
Well at least there's an explanation, not to keep this from happening again!

Monday, July 7, 2014

Tribune: Starting this fall, free breakfasts, lunches available for all CPS students

I can't believe according to this article, school lunches in elementary school could go for $2.45 on average. When I went to Bennett-Shedd it was .75 and went up to .85 cents. Perhaps the quality of food today is much better.

Regardless CPS has found some money to provide free meals to all students. That's certainly excellent news:
The high number of students living at the poverty level in the district qualified CPS to meet the required threshold for full reimbursement by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, according to CPS officials.

In the past school year, lunch at a typical elementary school  for students who didn’t qualify for assistance cost an average of about $2.45. High schools charges slightly more.

The district expects to serve 72 million meals to students in the coming year, two million more than during the last school year.

“If a student eats that day, the district gets reimbursed,” said Leslie Fowler, executive director of CPS’ nutritional support services. “But if they don’t eat, then CPS doesn’t get reimbursed and there’s no cost associated with that meal. We can’t predict what they do or don’t do, but we hope we can encourage them to participate.”

In the past, the school district’s free and reduced lunch program for financially eligible students was fraught with fraud. Several CPS school officials, including principals and assistant principals, were accused by the district’s Inspector General of providing false income information on applications for the free lunch program.
Sooooo, I don't have children yet, however, as a parent I would have fought tooth & nail not to pay over $2/day to feed my child. They'd get sent to school with a lunch from home at the very least.

Still this development under which this program has been expanded one thing is for certain CPS is dominated by low-income students.