Obviously, Marshall’s long-standing academic failings weren’t lost on Tamoura, who went on to say that she “wasn’t even supposed to be here.” Marshall was her last option. Her family couldn’t afford the private school that was her first choice, and she wasn’t offered a slot at Raby, one of the newer high schools sprouting up on the West Side.  

Tamoura was one of the Marshall freshmen profiled in “Class of 2011,” the award-winning issue of Catalyst In Depth that examined the challenges of High School Transformation. (The issue was published in February 2008 and is available online at www.catalyst-chicago.org.) As Tamoura entered 9th grade, Marshall had just begun the initiative. The goal was to make rigorous coursework the foundation of high school improvement—an idea tailor-made to suit studious teenagers like Tamoura.

Discussions about the many academic and social ills of urban high schools tend to give scant attention to the Tamouras at these schools. In other words, the kids who don’t get into trouble, who show up to school regularly, whose parents support their education but lack financial resources. These teens, like Tamoura, are savvy enough to know that their best option for getting into a good college is to bypass the neighborhood high school.

As one researcher said, “What are you doing about all the smart kids?”

Last year, the district embarked on a turnaround at Marshall, sinking millions into campus renovations and bringing in a new principal and mostly new teachers and staff. The success of turnarounds, at Marshall and other struggling high schools, is of national as well as local importance: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made the strategy a key part of federal education efforts.

For this issue of Catalyst In Depth, Deputy Editor Sarah Karp visited Marshall regularly during its first year in the turnaround program. From her reporting, it’s clear that the school is making progress. The climate is calmer, the special education department no longer faces state sanctions, and teachers have begun to collaborate regularly and focus on good instruction.

Marshall, of course, still faces big hurdles. For one, school leaders must balance the need to keep enrollment up—or face losing staff, as Marshall did eventually—with the challenge to improve academics. Nationally, other urban districts are in similar straits, trying to figure out how to handle the challenge of reforming large, failing neighborhood high schools. That’s a very tough job when a school is expected to take virtually any student who walks through the door, from the one who is ready for accelerated classes to the student who wants to transfer in but has a transcript filled with F’s—and a bad attitude to boot.  

Part of the answer is to focus on serving the good students, the Tamouras of the world, first.

That idea will undoubtedly anger some reformers, who will view it as a call to abandon at-risk teens. It’s not. Society—not just schools—has to figure out how to help youth who are on the road to dropping out.  When students like Tamoura show up, they’ve already made a critical leap. They’re motivated to learn, and they need the adults around them to respond to that motivation.

For the neighborhood high school to survive, individually and as a larger concept, academics have to improve. Schools have to offer honors and Advanced Placement classes, for one. And teachers need students who, even if they aren’t quite ready for it, are at least motivated to tackle high school-level work.

Donald Fraynd, a former principal of Jones College Prep who now heads the CPS turnaround initiative, says that big neighborhood high schools still have a role to play in the district. The turnaround high schools are “getting better and better at catching students up,” with more students achieving higher-than-average growth in reading skills and recovering credits toward graduation.

These accomplishments are heartening signs that the turnaround program may, finally, put long-failing neighborhood high schools back on track. And they’re a sign that, while poverty and social ills can be significant barriers to learning, they are not insurmountable.

Chicago’s high schools still have a long way to go, although at Catalyst press time, a new report from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research showed that high schools are, in fact, doing better academically than many observers believed to be the case.

At Marshall, there’s another small but encouraging sign that academics are on an upward trajectory.

In her senior year, Tamoura finally started getting more than 15 minutes’ worth of daily homework.

The switch happened not just to me, but to 67 other juniors in my school who were told we did not have enough credits. However, in my case and many others, we had between 11 and 14.5 credits, which is enough to be a junior and qualify to take the test. Some students did not have enough credits to be juniors in the first place, but that still does not explain why they were promoted to junior year in the fall and then demoted to sophomore status right before the Prairie State test.

Under so much pressure to raise its Prairie State test scores, the administration tried to take advantage of the promotion policy and demote a third of the junior class, just to keep us from taking the test and bringing down the school’s scores. I was having challenges at school but the last thing I would have expected is that my school system would demote me instead of supporting me.

This is not what school systems are supposed to do to students. They are supposed to provide extra support to students like me who don’t do well on tests or who might fall behind. But instead, they tried to make us disappear.

I care about my education. I want to go to college and to study music engineering. But when the future of a school rests on its test scores, students like me get demoted or pushed out. That’s why I joined the more than 100 juniors who boycotted the second day of the PSAE. We boycotted school, and the test, to send a message to Mayor Rahm Emanuel: School closings and student push-out, driven by high-stakes testing, must end.

Many adults disagreed with us, including CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett. Byrd-Bennett even tried to threaten and intimidate us, sending out a parent letter that insinuated that students who didn’t take the test on Wednesday would not be promoted to senior year.

This was a scare tactic that seemed designed to mislead parents. It did not give any information about the state-required make-up test in May or the established CPS practice of promoting juniors who sit for just one of the two days of the test. And what CPS didn’t realize was that these threats had actually already happened to me. CPS was threatening to withhold our promotion to senior year, but I had already been demoted in March as a direct result of Mayor Emanuel’s pressure on schools to raise test scores or face closure.

When these scare tactics did not prevent us from boycotting, CEO Byrd-Bennett scolded us, saying that “the only place that students should be during the school day is in the classroom with their teachers getting the education they need to be successful in life.” I agree with this statement, but does Mayor Emanuel? CPS pressure on schools to raise test scores actually leads to students getting pushed out of school. Many of the juniors who were demoted at my school started talking about dropping out because it was such a discouraging experience.

If CEO Byrd-Bennett and her boss, Mayor Emanuel, actually want every student to receive a good education every day, they should limit high-stakes tests, not use them to justify school closings in mainly African-American communities. The announcement that they are ending just one of a number of CPS tests given to kindergarteners is like the promise to give air-conditioning to students whose schools get closed. It’s a token effort given to us in the hopes that we will go away.

We want our boycott to be a wake-up call to Mayor Emanuel and CPS. We demand and end to testing-driven school closings, under-resourced schools, and student push-out. And we’re not going away.

Timothy Anderson is a student leader with Chicago Students Organizing to Save Our Schools (CSOSOS) and Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE).

Several young women slowly walk in with a look of consternation on their faces. “It is critical down there,” says one.

“That is crazy,” says another.

Teacher Magen Kilcoyne, whose curly, sandy-colored hair is pulled back and who is dressed in black cargo pants and a black “Bowen Class of 2012” T-shirt, shakes her head as she plops down copies of author Nathan McCall’s book “Makes Me Wanna Holler” on everyone’s desk.

“The boys were at it again,” she says, with a quick roll of the eyes.

Earlier, during lunch, a massive food fight in the cafeteria turned into a brawl. Police were called in, and some students were carted off in two paddy wagons. Principal Jennifer Kirmes says it was Bowen’s worst day so far this year in terms of school climate.

Jasmine Bennett, one of the girls in Mrs. K’s girls-only book club, says she stood against the wall, terrified, as students climbed up on tables and jumped off onto other students’ heads.

Though a fight is disturbing any day, it is especially disappointing that it happened on a Wednesday, a day that Kirmes is trying to make special. On that day, students take a break from their regular classes and pick from special classes that include options like robotics, journalism, chorus, recycling and the book club run by Kilcoyne.

The new initiative gives students at Bowen at least some exposure to the kind of electives that more elite schools routinely offer. Wednesday is also a day during which students can make up credits or attend group therapy to help them cope with problems such as managing anger or trauma.

“Intervention and extension,” says Kirmes, describing the initiative. Though it’s new, students have responded, coming to school more regularly not only on Wednesdays but Thursdays as well.

Without the initiative, Bowen’s course offerings are bare-bones. Every class is one that will count toward graduation requirements.

Within Chicago Public Schools, high school course offerings vary drastically—from paltry, as at Bowen, to robust, as at Walter Payton on the Near North Side. The type and size of the school and the skill level of incoming students are factors that drive the disparity. Bowen is a neighborhood high school with just 522 students, most of them with lower-level skills.

The most drastic dissimilarities are between high schools in impoverished neighborhoods with dwindling populations and selective enrollment high schools in more middle-class communities.

Payton, a selective enrollment school, has a 27-page, full-color catalog of course offerings. In it, students can read descriptions of courses ranging from 20th Century Global Conflicts to Advanced Jazz Band to a physics class focused on electricity and magnetism.

Payton also offers an all- honors curriculum for freshmen and sophomores; in junior and senior year, students can move into Advanced Placement classes.

“The complexity of the texts is pretty significant,” says Principal Ted Devine. “They are college-level.”

Meanwhile, at Bowen, the course offerings are summed up on one page. Other than the special Wednesday classes, the electives are sparse, mostly reserved for seniors and straightforward, like creative writing.

Kirmes says the staff is “toying” with the idea of an honors program, but some teachers do not believe in tracking students. Until two years ago, Bowen was split into small schools, some offering honors tracks.

Most of Bowen’s incoming freshmen score a 12 (out of a possible 25) on the Explore, the standardized test that is the precursor to the ACT. The score puts Bowen among the bottom 10 in the district on this measure, with only eight other high schools posting worse scores.

“There are very few exceptions,” Kirmes says. “There will be maybe one 16.”

Bowen does offer several Advanced Placement classes, but teachers lament that students are not prepared for them.

During her regular history classes, Kilcoyne covers the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson and the fallacy of separate but equal schooling. She points out that so much of what she teaches is still relevant today.

Kilcoyne once brought a group of young women from Bowen to Payton for a tour. Not only did students seem to be learning entirely different, more rigorous content, but the school environment was the polar opposite of Bowen’s.

Payton was built in 2000 and has state-of-the-art equipment, while Bowen was built in 1910 and needs $38 million in repairs. Bowen’s disrepair is obvious, with broken ceiling tiles, old peeling paint and classrooms that are either too warm or too cold.

For the first time, Kilcoyne says, the young women realized how different one school can be from another. They were stunned.

“The conditions here are subpar,” Kilcoyne says. “This wouldn’t fly at Jones or Payton. It breaks my heart. It makes me want to cry.”

At smaller neighborhood schools like Bowen, programmers have an increasingly hard time offering a variety of classes. If students need remedial coursework, such as a double period of reading or math, it often fills the time they would otherwise spend on art, music or other electives. Many students don’t start working on their required language and art classes until junior year—too late for them to dive into these subjects if they discover a propensity for them.

CPS does not keep or review high school course catalogs on a centralized basis. But Mayor Rahm Emanuel and CPS officials have seemingly realized how inconsistent course offerings are and how neighborhood schools fall short. A push is on to level the playing field.

They designated five schools as STEM Early College schools, giving students an opportunity to go to accelerated math and science classes and eventually take community college classes. Also, Emanuel announced that he was expanding IB offerings. Five schools will become “wall-to-wall” IB schools, while five more will add separate IB programs.

The ultimate goal of the IB program is for students to earn a full-fledged IB diploma. CPS does not currently track how many students in existing IB programs earn the diplomas, according to a response from a Freedom of Information request.

Jasmine Bennett did not expect to attend Bowen. She planned to go to a private Catholic school. Then, her mother lost her job and couldn’t afford it. But like many students at even the worst schools, Jasmine tries hard and has carved out a niche for herself.

This school year, she started an initiative with her friends to encourage students to say five positive things to five teachers. The only rule is that the compliments must be truthful. “So you can’t tell them they look nice, if they don’t,” Jasmine says. “They react with a huge smile.”

Jasmine says she started the project because she imagines it is difficult to work at Bowen.

Now a junior, Jasmine has gotten serious about her studies. She spends about an hour every day doing homework, usually staying after school because once at home, she forgets what work she needs to do.

She and her two friends are clearly treated specially in the school. One Friday, two days after the big food fight, they bypass the cafeteria and instead head to the counselors’ offices to see if they can share the counselors’ stash of food.

No one has anything for them this day, so the young women are forced to go to the cafeteria. Because of the food fight, no hot food is being served. Instead, they get trays with apples, milk and packaged graham cracker-and-peanut butter sandwiches.

After the quick lunch, the girls escape the noisy cafeteria to go to the college coach’s office, where they hang out until their next class. Jasmine talks about college trips she made. Only seniors are supposed to be college ambassadors, but she is an honorary one.

Jasmine says she doesn’t think that she is missing anything academically by attending Bowen. Her teachers know better.

Thinking of one bright young man, Kilcoyne says she worries that he is not being challenged because of the lack of experience writing essays. Instead of a lot of writing, Kilcoyne focuses on discussions in her classes. “Everyone can express their opinion,” she explains.

Tonda Tyre, who teaches Bowen’s AP literature and language classes, also says she is constantly modifying her lessons to make them doable for students, even though AP wants teachers to stick to standard curricula.

By the time students take her AP classes, few are working at an advanced level. This school year, she says, teachers got together for the first time to talk about tackling the problem by aligning content from one grade to the next.

Kirmes told Tyre she could weed out some of the students who signed up for AP, but she didn’t want to do it. She asked the students if anyone wanted to leave and avoid the harder work. “None of them wanted to go,” Tyre says.

Still, not all of the students have stepped up to the challenge. Tyre says she constantly weighs expectations against reality. She models how assignments should be done and makes a big deal out of it whenever a student does something right.

One day, she asks students to turn in their vocabulary notebook, where they are expected to list new words they have come across and the definitions. Not one student takes a notebook out. After a quiz, several students start going through dictionaries, feverishly writing down words they don’t know.

Seeing this, Tyre sighs. She gives them until Monday to turn in the notebooks.

Instead, the new building will incorporate the old and become one school, with about double the number of selective enrollment seats. Jones currently has about 880 students. With an additional 250 selective enrollment seats each grade, it will eventually be about 1,700 students.

Emanuel said he made the decision after realizing that many students wanted to go to Jones, but couldn’t get in. Of the 18,000 who applied for selective high schools last year, 9,000 listed Jones as one of their choices, he said.

“We all know that when the [selective enrollment rejection] letters arrive, the next day, there are some `For Sale’ signs in the windows,” he said, referring to parents who move from the city if they can't get their children in top schools.

Emanuel said parents should have more choices to send their children to a selective enrollment high school, charter high school or neighborhood high school. And he lauded the fact that Jones serves a diverse student body.

Emanuel did not take questions at the press conference.

But Ald. Bob Fioretti, who has led the push to turn the old Jones into a neighborhood school, said residents who don’t feel like their neighborhood school is a safe, quality option will also leave the city.

“The last 15 years has seen the central loop grow exponentially,” he said. “When it comes to high school, 40 percent move out of the city. It is an incredible economic loss to the city and this is a way to stem the loss.”

Fioretti says community groups from the South Loop, the West Loop, Chinatown and Bronzeville all support the idea of creating a new neighborhood high school.

The existing high schools where students from these communities would be assigned are Phillips, Wells or Dunbar. Dunbar and Phillips are Level 3 schools, the worst CPS rating. This year, Wells moved to a Level 2 school, the mid-rating. All three are underutilized.

Though Fioretti says it is not enough, the new Jones will have some concessions for neighborhood students. They will be given preference for 75 seats set aside for a new pre-law and pre-engineering program. Katie Ellis, executive director of access and enrollment for CPS, says the seats for the new programs will be awarded to the top 75 students who apply from the neighborhood, based on test scores and grades. At least 800 students applied this year.

For current parents of students at Jones, the expansion brings some mixed feelings. Yvonne LaGrone, who has a freshman and a senior at the school, says the transition from a small school to a relatively big one will be hard for students. LaGrone sent her children to small private elementary schools and says they have been somewhat sheltered.  

But she says more students need the opportunity to go to a selective enrollment school. Like many, she says her neighborhood school is not an option.

At the same time, her brother, who has a daughter in 8th grade and lives two blocks away from Jones, should have the option of going to Jones for high school, she says. She thinks the seats set aside for neighborhood students are enough.

LaGrone says that Jones offers all honors and Advanced Placement classes and, therefore, students need to be functioning at a certain level to be competitive.

“We have a reputation and we want to maintain that reputation even as we expand,” she said.

The commission’s interim report,  released last week, said the district should not shut down any high schools because of safety concerns as students cross gang boundaries traveling to new schools.

Byrd-Bennett also said the list of schools that could be shut down won’t be announced before the first set of community hearings on the closings. Last week, she had said the list would be published before the hearings started.

 At the first round of community hearings (two to be held in each network), CPS officials will present “high-level” information about the schools in the community. The first hearing will be at 7 p.m. on Jan. 28 at Truman College. After that, they take place nearly every day through February.

By Feb. 13, the list will be complete and the second round of community hearings will take place.

“It is important to not just throw out a list,” Byrd-Bennett said Friday. Using the commission’s recommendations, she is paring down the original list of 330 underutilized schools and said staff need to take time to figure out how to incorporate some of the more vague recommendations, such as not to close mid-level schools that are “on the rise.”

In a letter to the commission, Bryd-Bennett agreed that high schools should be off the table because of potential danger to students. “We will remove high schools from consideration in our efforts to address our utilization challenges,” according to the letter.

But Friday, Byrd-Bennett said she could still take action to close dilapidated high schools that pose a health and safety risk and are too expensive to repair. Also, sometimes high schools are so small that the district cannot provide a “robust learning environment,” she added. These instances are rare, she said.

According to CPS data, 17 high schools are more than 50 percent underutilized and have hefty price tags for maintenance and repair, including seven with price tags of more than $30 million for upkeep.

Overall, most underutilized schools are in poor, African American neighborhoods. CPS released the latest school-by-school utilization rates in December. CPS officials say they must close schools so that they can spread the district's scarce resources further, but it is unclear how much savings the district will actually incur.

Other recommendations off the table

Byrd-Bennett also said she is not signing on to other recommendations against shutting down schools with more than 600 students, schools with borderline under-utilization rates and schools that have recently experienced a significant action. Byrd-Bennett said she and her staff will look at each school to see if they are likely to attract more students and to figure out what is the definition of a “significant school action.”

Having been in Chicago for only a short time, she said she is not sure how school actions have impacted students.

“I need to find out which school, which actions, to which children,” she said.

“Over the next few weeks, I will work with my team to characterize this descriptor and assess the impacts to students and their families who have previously been through a previous school action,” she writes in the letter to the commission.

Byrd-Bennett says she agrees with the commission that high-performing underutilized schools should be spared, as well as those mid-level schools that seem to be trending upward. She also will not close schools that are adding grades.

She said she and her team will have to figure out the definition of mid-performing schools that are “on the rise.”

Though it was outside the boundaries of the School Utilization Commission, they also recommended holding charter schools to the same criteria for closing as traditional CPS schools. Byrd-Bennett said she is committed to creating a unified accountability and closing process for both types of school.

Attached is a list of community hearings, their dates and locations.

School clinicians say they are seeing more students who are dangerously depressed, psychotic or aggressive, prompting them to call the hotline more often. Most of the school calls originate in Chicago, but the trend extends across the state, according to data from the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services for 2007 through 2011 (the latest available). (See graphic.)

A hotline call is often a sure-fire way—perhaps the only way, in some cases—for clinicians, teachers and other school personnel to get help for a troubled child. A call triggers an assessment of the child via telephone and then, if the child shows severe symptoms, an immediate assessment by a community mental health agency. More than two-thirds of children who spent any time in a psychiatric hospital in 2011 came through this assessment process.

Once a child is referred for an assessment, he or she automatically receives therapy for 90 days from the mental health agency, regardless of whether they are hospitalized. Social workers and others consider this process the quickest way to get help for a child.

Last year, at least 10,000 children were admitted to a psychiatric hospital on the same day they were evaluated as a result of a hotline call. About 20 percent of the children were admitted more than once—a sign, experts say, of the lack of follow-up services for children once they are released.

The deluge of hotline calls and the increase in hospitalizations—up from 7,000 five years ago—is at least partly due to cuts in funding for community mental health services, experts also note.

“There is a documented link between stressors in the community and mental health,” says Collette Lueck, managing director for the Illinois Children’s Mental Health Partnership, a state initiative aimed at improving services. “We know the number of children exposed to violence has increased and that can take its toll.”

Children who are exposed to trauma often become depressed or feel helpless, Lueck says; in turn, they may act out and become disruptive in schools. CPS has trained school staff to call the hotline “if a student is in crisis -- no matter the nature of the crisis – [so] that the student can be properly screened and assessed,” says spokesman Frank Shuftan.

Chris Carroll, who runs the evaluation unit for the Community Counseling Center of Chicago, says more cases of aggression in children are surfacing, with much of the behavior linked to trauma. The Community Counseling Center of Chicago on the North Side runs the largest assessment unit in the state, responsible for an area that stretches from West Ridge on the far North Side to Austin on the West Side. (The agency also serves some north suburbs.)

“Schools see the behavior, and they don’t know where it is coming from,” Carroll says. “When children see killings or are victims of child abuse, they react to those things.”

Many community-based centers that could provide help for children have closed down, and those that are still open often have long waiting lists.

Illinois ranks third in the nation for cuts to mental health services, according to a November 2011 report by the National Association of Mental Illness. Funding for community mental health services for children was reduced by 13 percent between fiscal year 2009 and 2012, according to a budget analysis done by Illinois KidsCount, an annual report with data on children and families.

“Children who do not get treatment in the community wind up coming through the crisis door,” Carroll says. “CPS sees everything, from aggressive children to psychotic children, and they are the least-trained to deal with it.

The assessment system has long been used by the state’s Department of Children and Family Services, to curtail the flow of foster children into psychiatric hospitals. In 2004, it was expanded to serve any child without insurance or with public insurance, such as Medicaid or KidsCare. About half of the children in Illinois have public insurance, according to Illinois KidsCount.

The expansion was born out of the Illinois Children’s Mental Health Partnership, whose executive committee wanted the hotline and assessment system to serve more children and prevent the over-use of psychiatric hospitalization, an expensive option that experts say should be used as a last resort when children are a danger to themselves or others.

Severe crises, more hospitalizations

 At a large North Side high school, one social worker describes several situations that prompted her to call the hotline. [The social worker asked that her name and school not be published for privacy reasons.]

In one case, a student told the social worker that she had tried to commit suicide by taking dozens of pills, leaving the empty bottles on her nightstand. She woke up later, but her mother wouldn’t acknowledge the suicide attempt.

In another case, a child told her that he talks to ghosts.  

Yet another student was so aggressive, angry, and out-of-control that the social worker feared another Columbine-style shooting. The young man was admitted to the hospital; he has since been released and is back at school. She tries to keep a close eye on him, yet notes that she’s the only social worker in the school of nearly 1,500 students.

“We see a lot here,” she says. “Sometimes I think this is the job from hell.”

When she questions whether or not to call the hotline, she first calls Community Counseling Center of Chicago. Sometimes she is advised to call the hotline. But in other instances, the agency tells her to see if she can talk the parent into getting the child help in the community—and often the parent doesn’t take that action.

“I had one student who was muttering and wouldn’t make eye contact and was acting really bizarre, but the family didn’t want services,” the social worker recalls. She tries to keep an eye on him, too.

Troubled children, in fact, are often caught between a mental health system that is stretched thin and a parent who has trouble making time to deal with the problem, says Ashley Fountaine, a project manager with the Chicago chapter of the National Association of Mental Illness. Hospitalization is not always a bad option, Fountaine adds, because it serves a purpose in extreme cases.

Sometimes the assessment teams get pressure from schools to hospitalize a child, according to team directors. Carroll says there have been cases in which exasperated school staff will threaten a child with hospitalization—then become angry when the crisis team refuses.

“People don’t understand that hospitals don’t fix kids,” Carroll says. “They stabilize them. The real work has to be done in the community.”

In Chicago, two-thirds of children who undergo assessments are admitted into hospitals, compared to about half of children downstate and in the suburbs, according to a Catalyst Chicago analysis. Even so, school personnel sometimes believe that assessment teams decline hospitalization because of the cost

Maria Lupe, who runs the assessment unit at Mt. Sinai Hospital on the West Side, says her team gets more calls about severe problems in young children, such as one call about a 1^st-grader whose behavior was out of control. But Lupe also get calls from schools about situations that she considers less than urgent. One clue is if the school has sent a child home.

“Why would you send them home if they were in danger?” she says.

Unequal resources

Community mental health agencies and school personnel say that even more children could be kept out of hospitals if the resources in schools and neighborhoods were better.

At schools, social workers are assigned by the district based on the needs of special education students.  Overall, CPS has about 360 social workers and a student enrollment of about 350,000—a ratio of about 1 social worker for every 1,000 students, far above the ratio recommended by the National Association of Social Workers of one school social worker for every 250 students.

 With such workloads, a crisis is often the first and only time the social worker will encounter a child who is not in special education.

As a result, says social worker Susan Hickey, social workers have little time either for students who are not in special education or for prevention work. When Hickey gets wind of a student struggling with emotional issues, she refers the family to a community health clinic. But often, the parent doesn’t follow up.

Assessment teams used to go into schools to do presentations on mental health and provide information about services. But the state no longer provides money for such outreach, says Michelle Churchey-Mims, director of children’s mental health and child welfare services for Metropolitan Family Services.

With grant money, Metropolitan Family Services sometimes provides therapy services in schools, and the number of mental health crises in these schools seems to be lower, Churchey-Mims says.

Jennifer Schultz, secretary for the Illinois School Psychologist Association, has first-hand experience with the disparity in resources. She left Indian Springs School District in the working-class suburb of Justice for a job at Homewood-Flossmoor High School in a more affluent south suburb. Now she works with three other psychologists and four social workers—in all, 11 clinicians for 2,800 students, with some dedicated solely to general education students and others focused on those in special education.

In this environment, Schultz says she has ample time to provide therapy for individual students and intervention before problems become severe.

Children in every community have struggles, notes Caroll of Community Counseling Center. “We go to Orr and Westinghouse and we go to Glenbard South. The big difference is the resources.”

Lack of hospital space, child psychiatrists

Hotline calls may provide immediate help for children facing a crisis. But the larger, systemic problems with the mental health system do not disappear, and often come back to haunt them.

Assessment teams sometimes cannot find a hospital bed for a child, or can only find a bed far away from the child’s home. Some communities have few hospitals with a psychiatric unit that will take children.

Roseland Hospital recently opened a psychiatric unit for teenagers and Ingalls Hospital in Harvey has an inpatient psychiatric unit for children, says Churchey-Mims. If these units are full, a child from the South Side or suburbs will have to go to the West Side or the Northwest suburbs, a hardship on families.

At Mt. Sinai, Maria Lupe works closely with psychiatric hospitals to figure out what is the best match with the child. One of the criteria she considers is whether they have Spanish-speaking staff, since most of her clients are Latino.

Though she is willing to send children to any area, it can still be difficult to secure a bed. “Overcrowding is a big thing,” Lupe says. “Sometimes they have no beds available and we have to go to hospitals farther away from the neighborhood.”

Another issue is a dearth of child psychiatrists in many communities, which makes it difficult to schedule follow-up appointments. An appointment is particularly important if a child has been placed on medication.  

“We have work to do once they are released,” Lupe says.

The state requires that children released from hospitals see a psychiatrist within 14 days. To meet this requirement, Carroll set up clinic hours with Counseling Center’s two psychiatrists. Several families get an appointment for a given time, and they are seen on a first come, first serve basis.

Carroll admits it’s not an ideal setup, but says it is the only way he can meet the requirement.

Further, after the crisis team’s 90-day monitoring of the child, there’s no guarantee of follow-up.

“Everything in crisis is immediate,” he says. “Everything after that is questionable.”

As students get older, the picture continues to be bleak. Students who don’t meet at least three college readiness standards on the ACT have only a 15 percent chance of graduating from college, according to research. Because of lack of preparation, fewer than 30 percent of Illinois students who go to college will graduate, the report projects.

Advance Illinois Executive Director Robin Steans says the finding that so few students are reading well in 3rd grade is “shocking,” even though she is immersed in the education world.

The fact that these students never catch up is a call to action, Steans said.

Another troubling finding: 15 percent of young adults are out of work and out of school, up from 13 percent in 2010, according to the report “The State We’re In.”

Illinois also has one of the worst achievement gaps in the nation. “A shockingly low 12 percent of African American students, 18 percent of Latino students and 16 percent of low-income students read proficiently in 4th grade,” according to the report. Yet the gap narrowed slightly in 8^th-grade and more students of color and poor students are taking Advanced Placement exams, though few are passing them.

The biennial report issued by the powerful advocacy group is meant to pull together a variety of statistics to paint a full picture of education in the state.

Overall, the latest report gives the state slightly better grades than it did two years ago. In the area of early education, Illinois continues to get an incomplete; in elementary and high school education, the state gets a C-minus, up from a D; and in post-secondary education, it gets a C-plus, up from a C.

Yet most of the reason why Illinois did better is that it held steady, while other states declined.

“I don’t want there to be any false celebrations,” says Bill Daley, co-chair of the Advance Illinois board.

The report comes out just as the state is implementing a host of changes to the education system, from the more rigorous Common Core standards—and, eventually, new tests based on those standards—to a new teacher and principal evaluation system to a protocol to assess how many preschoolers are ready for kindergarten.

Steans says she’s hoping the report underscores the importance of implementing these new measures well.

“All these parts matter and relate to each other,” Steans says. “It is a life boat. If you are missing even one plank, you will sink.”

High school exit exams?

The report also might set the stage for new legislation to make sure that students don’t graduate from high school without the skills to get through college. About 55 percent of Illinois high school graduates go on to college, according to the report.

“College is expensive,” says Steans, noting another finding: Paying for college takes 21 percent of a typical family’s median income, a percentage that has risen since 2010.

Steans says a state committee is looking at options to ensure that students don’t go to college only to drop out, such as high school exit tests or, as an alternative, end-of-course tests that students take as they complete classes.

Yet Steans stresses that she believes the problems in college begin way before hand.

Illinois has been widely seen as a leader in providing preschool to three and four- year-olds. With 20 percent of three-year-olds in state-funded programs, Illinois is still No. 1 in the nation. However, over the past two years, the number dropped by 1 percentage point and the report notes that budget pressures may result in even fewer children have access to preschool in the future.

Illinois still gets a grade of incomplete in early childhood because it still does not have information on how many children walk into kindergarten with the age-appropriate skills and knowledge. Illinois, however, is expected in 2015 to roll out statewide a survey tool to measure school readiness.

Strengthen the ‘essential supports’

To change the scenario, the report advocates that schools focus on strengthening the essential supports—ambitious instruction, collaborative teachers, effective leaders, supportive environments and involved families—which were identified by the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago.

One hurdle in bringing more of these supports to schools is the growth in low-income enrollment coupled with a lack of resources for these students, according to the Advance Illinois report. One example: Illinois is ranked 43rd nationally in the ratio of students to counselors.

Advance Illinois points to Massachusetts as one of the places Illinois should emulate. Almost two decades ago, Massachusetts legislators passed a bill that, among other strategies, promised equitable funding across school districts and implemented a high school exit exam. The state also tests teachers on a general curriculum and requires them to do art and science coursework.

As a result, Massachusetts has experienced a surge in student achievement, according to the report.

Illinois stands to see some of the same improvement after the implementation of the reforms set out in recently-adopted legislation and policy, Steans says. But the improvement will not happen quickly.

The 2012 report opens with a 10-page narrative that attempts to put Illinois in context, arguing that the state is still a leader in the number of adults with college degrees but is in danger of falling behind. Also, it points out that the United States is behind other nations in academic performance.

Daley says he and other business leaders became involved with Advance Illinois out of concern that the state was not producing enough qualified workers for higher- skilled jobs. “If we don’t do something about this, our economy is going to deteriorate,” he says.

 The rating system casts a much more troubling light on high schools, with half of traditional CPS high schools given the worst rating. CPS has ratings for only 14 of about 40 charter high schools, but of those, 57 percent were given the lowest rating. (CPS officials say they are still collecting data from some charters and will provide updated data once the information is complete.) 

This year, the district was supposed to debut a new single-application process that would mean students could apply for all schools in one place and then get one offer. The centralized system would be modeled on the application process now used in New York City and Boston. Last November, the Board of Education awarded the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice a $390,000 contract to help develop the new application.

CPS spokeswoman Robyn Ziegler says CPS officials felt that they were implementing too many other initiatives, such as the common core and the longer school day, to also roll out the single high school application. She says it is now scheduled to be implemented next year. 

Though she says that the delay had nothing to do with unresolved issues, those intimate with the process say CPS is still working through topics such as how to incorporate charter schools into the mix. 

The specifics of how CPS’ single application system would work are not yet clear. But such a drastic change from the current process—in which students apply separately to selective enrollment schools, magnet schools, charter schools and specialty programs and can get accepted into one of each kind—will mean a significant shift.

In cities with a single-application process, students receive one offer to the highest-ranked school that they are admitted to, either through test scores or a lottery.

All high schools become schools of choice, even neighborhood high schools, and are put into the mix. Students can easily end up traveling across the city, though that is often the norm already in CPS since only half of students attend their neighborhood high school.

Questions on charters, neighborhood schools

Among the biggest unresolved issues with the new CPS process was how to incorporate charter schools and neighborhood high schools into the mix, say Illinois Network of Charter Schools President Andrew Broy. Broy served on the committee working on developing the application.

Charter schools currently accept students based on a lottery, but students may apply to many charter schools and get put on waiting lists. With a single application and a single offer, these waiting lists would disappear—and that could prove to be a problem, Broy says.

“So what would happen if a student listed their preferences as Northside Prep, Perspectives and Noble Street, in that order?” Broy says. “They didn’t get into Northside Prep or Perspectives, but get an offer from Noble Street. Now what if someone transfers out of Perspectives, but there’s no waiting list and no way to let the student at Noble Street know the seat is available?”

Plus, charter schools often use waiting lists as evidence that they are in demand. Yet, because each charter schools runs its own individual admissions process, students can be on multiple waiting lists, even after they have accepted a spot at another school.

Broy admits that some charter schools are worried that the single-application system will expose that they are not in demand.

Yet charter schools are under pressure to be a part of any central application process. For one, CEO Jean-Claude Brizard has complained that having so many applications for parents and students to fill out is frustrating and confusing. And last year, charter schools signed on to a compact with the district that states that “ideally” charter schools would be part of the application process. That compact brought charter schools a boost in per-pupil funding and money to pay for special education teachers.

Neighborhood schools are another issue. Because many of them have been struggling academically for years, it is assumed that few students will list them as a preference. Though they have long been seen as schools of last resort, making them the official default for students who get in nowhere else is a dicey proposition.

Broy says that the committee discussed the fact that principals at neighborhood high schools need time to market their programs before the single application is fully implemented.

8^th-graders to get letter

Though the single application is delayed, the application process will include several new procedures this year. According the Office of Academic Enhancement, CPS will send every 8^th-grader an eligibility letter, identifying what schools they could to apply to.

New York City has a similar procedure: The district looks at individual 7^th-grade reading scores and divides students into the top third, middle third and lower third. The category that the student is in determines which schools they can apply to.

In CPS, eligibility will be determined by a student’s 7^th-grade test scores and grades. But it’s still unclear whether the letters will only include information on whether students have a shot at a selective enrollment high school or program, or whether they also suggest charter and neighborhood schools to apply to.

The Office of Academic Enhancement’s website also says that an elementary guide to options will be available Monday, the day the process opens. However, the high school guide won’t be ready until later this month.

CPS no longer plans to put on the Options for Knowledge elementary and high school informational fairs. Instead, “detailed and informational PowerPoint Presentations” will be on the website.

Important CPS application process dates include:

• October 8 – All applications available
• November 5 – Testing begins for selective enrollment elementary schools
• November 17 – Testing begins for selective enrollment high schools
• December 14 – All applications due

The month of uproar appears to have forced the district to acquiesce a bit, as two AP classes were reinstated. But students and activists still want an apology from CPS and the old principal brought back. They also are asking bigger questions about the future and structure of the school.

The Little Village/North Lawndale campus, which houses the School of Social Justice, is one of the only remaining places where small schools exist. Under the Chicago High School Redesign Initiative, CPS opened 23 small high schools between 2002 and 2007. At the time, experts advocated changing big neighborhood high schools into small schools so that students could get personal attention and feel connected.

In 2005, the Little Village/North Lawndale campus was built after community members waged a hunger strike. It was designed to accommodate three small schools.

Studies of small schools found that their students performed as well academically as similar students, but were more likely to graduate. Still, the modest improvements did not seem to justify them. Over the past few years, all of the campuses that had been split into small schools have been consolidated, except Little Village/North Lawndale.    

The performance of the School of Social Justice has not been all that impressive, though in the past year test scores improved significantly.

Rico Gutstein, a UIC College of Education professor who was on the school’s design team, says community members are worried that the school will be turned around or consolidated.

Small schools always had advisory LSCs and that has proved to be a problem in the current controversy. Activists and students are now insisting on Social Justice’s LSC becoming a full-fledged council with binding principal hiring and firing power.

Though the decision was not unanimous, LSC members said they recommended in the Spring that Kathy Farr be given a contract. CPS officials refused to grant her one. Then, on Aug. 7, Farr said she was told she no longer had a job. CPS officials would not comment on Farr’s removal.

The removal came just five days before school was to start at Social Justice, a Track E school.

Marisa Velasquez, who used to work in an area office and is a former assistant principal at Roosevelt High School, showed up the next day. She soon eliminated two Advanced Placement English classes and an AP psychology class.

CPS officials said that there weren’t enough qualifying students to justify the classes.

But on Friday, Velasquez decided that she would combine the two AP English classes and reinstate the psychology class. Some of the teachers who had been laid off were also reinstated, according to community activists.

“The students, who were upper-classmen, had demonstrated how passionate they were for the class,” according to CPS communications.

Patricia Buenrostro, who was part of the hunger strike that helped create the school, says that is not enough. The council is now united in asking for Farr to return.

Buenrostro says council members have demanded a written explanation from Velasquez. “Victory, for us, is community accountability for our schools,” Buenrostro says. “That’s what we fought for 11 years ago.”

Cristian Gutierrez, a senior, complains the frequent principal turnover – the school is now on its fourth principal in 10 months – has caused students to feel that “we don’t know who to go to for our issues.”

“You can’t really go to the principal if they keep on changing,” he says.

Maria Herrera, whose daughter is a senior at the school, complained that the teacher layoffs (now rescinded) left substitutes teaching classes and that the level of coursework took a nosedive. “We pay taxes so that they can give us a good education,” she said in Spanish, “(But) they are receiving 8^th-grade-level classes.”

Maria Centeno, the mother of a freshman and a senior, complained that her children have not had homework in weeks.

Chicago Teachers Union Staff Coordinator Jackson Potter says the union is in the process of filing ten grievances at the school, plus an unfair labor practices charge accusing CPS of retaliating against teachers for protected union activities.

At the front of the room on an August night, a young man in dress clothes points to a poster of “The Five Love Languages.” They are: words of encouragement, appropriate physical touch, quality time, acts of service and giving meaningful gifts.

The young man’s presentation is part of Peer Advocates for Health, a summer program for African-American young men on the South Side. Summer programs often provide young people with exposure to activities that address “holes” in their education, and Peer Advocates for Health offers these young men—who often are missing from conversations about good relationships and living well—training in how to lead healthy lives and in turn, train their peers.

LaRon Sneed, a rising sophomore, said he learned how to be more self-disciplined.

“It taught me how to be a young man,” Sneed says. “It taught me to take responsibility for myself.”

Peer Advocates for Health was founded in 2000 by Options For Youth President Pat Mosena. Mosena had previously established a program to teach teenage mothers about sexual health and birth control in order to delay a second pregnancy and help ensure the girls graduated from high school. Mosena later realized that the organization should also focus on the male side of the birth control equation as well.

Peer Advocates for Health begins in the summer with an 8-week paid “boot camp” that is geared toward 14- to 19-year-old African-American young men on the South Side. About 25 young men are accepted into the program and about half complete it and become peer educators.

During the boot camp, the boys go to class for four to five hours a day, four days a week. They have homework, essays and assignments in the community that they must complete or risk having their pay docked.

“It is not just a summer job,” Mosena said. “It’s very intense.”

The young men learn about healthy relationships, communication and decision-making, education and career planning, birth control and sexual health, and HIV/AIDs—a major health concern on the South Side and elsewhere in the black community.

After the summer boot camp, the Peer Advocates meet once a week during the school year and then, starting in January, take their message to the community by putting together formal health presentations for schools and women’s shelters. They also hold “Let’s talk about it” sessions once a month at middle schools on the South Side. Why would boys be going to women’s shelters?

At the end of the summer, the teens give presentations on topics of their choosing to their family and community members. This year’s eleven Peer Advocates split into four groups for presentations on healthy relationships, teen pregnancy, birth control and avoiding sexually-transmitted diseases.  

One morning in August, 14 girls gather in the parking lot of Fiske Elementary School on the South Side. In the parking lot are two cars, smashed up and with bullets scattered around the tires.  On one car, something that looks like blood is spread across the dashboard. 

The girls gather around Chicago Police Department forensic investigator, Eric Szwed, and listen to him describe the steps for examining and processing a crime scene.

“Always be aware of your surroundings when processing evidence,” Szwed says. “It’ll prevent you from contaminating the scene.”

The young women, clad in hairnets, face masks and booties, look around curiously.  Several professionals from the police department and other agencies are on hand to point out to the girls what to notice and collect.

Today’s event is part of Forensic Investigators, a summer program that teaches students in middle school and high school how to look at a crime scene from a scientific point of view. It’s the newest program run by Project Exploration, a non-profit initiative that works foster interest in science among students traditionally missing from the field.

Like the young men Peer Advocates, the young women participating in Forensic Investigators say they learned something that they will keep with them for their life.

Kaylor Oscar, a rising junior at Perspectives High School of Technology, says she wants to be a forensic scientist when she grows up. Oscar has been participating in Project Exploration summer programs since 7th grade, and says a forensic scientist who was a guest speaker at one program piqued her interest in the career. She immediately signed up when she heard that Forensic Investigators was being launched.

Project Exploration Chief Executive Officer Paige Ponder said the young women chosen for the program are not necessarily honors students.

“We want students who may be struggling academically because it would have more of an impact for them,” Ponder says. “This way, their learning in school is applied to real life.”

The crime scene activity comes at the end of the first week. The students will then process the “evidence” in a lab. On the last day of the program, they’ll present the evidence as “expert witnesses” in a mock trial.

“Our model is students working with practicing professionals,” Ponder says. “It takes a village, man, to raise forensic scientists!”

Oscar is actively engaged as she investigates the crime scene, but notes that she wants to work in a lab. Some day, she says, she would love to come back to Project Exploration and teach other students about her profession.

“I love Project Exploration, because they give young people opportunities they might not get anywhere else – and it’s free.”

This year’s proposed budget includes just $13 million to pay for these officers, far less than officials have previously estimated as the cost for current staffing levels. But CPS officials declined to say which schools would lose their police officers and how many would be cut.

Spokeswoman Robyn Ziegler responded to a request for details with the statement: “Police officers will continue to play a very important role in providing for the safety of our students in our schools.” Ziegler added that the district is moving toward a more holistic approach to safety that focuses on classroom management and positive behavior supports.

Principals, however, say they would like concrete answers about what to expect next year. Wells Principal Ernesto Mathias says he has heard nothing about a reduction in police officers.

“I filled out a basic form for security needs but nothing else,” Matias wrote via e-mail.

New Corliss Principal Leonard Harris says he definitely sees a role for police officers in the schools: Their presence makes people feel safe.

“They are able to address some of the immediate issues that might come up,” he says.

Last year, CPS leaders, then new to the job, tried to entice principals to get rid of their school’s police officers, offering them $25,000 in exchange for letting the officers go. But few principals took the cash.

Even principals in schools with high-performing students in better neighborhoods, such as Whitney Young, held onto their police officers. As a result, the district didn’t realize the savings officials predicted and the district paid nearly $20 million to keep the police in place.

Reducing the police presence in schools is a goal of VOYCE--Voices of Youth in Chicago Education--a coalition of student activists who say the regular presence of police in schools leads to arrests for minor offenses.

VOYCE wanted CPS to impose more stringent guidelines for police calls in the revamped Student Code of Conduct approved in June. Yet CPS refused, leaving the code as is as it pertains to police involvement in schools.

Paying cops vs. teachers?

Last year, VOYCE leaders said the cost of the police in schools is another reason to limit their presence. This year, the issue of cost recently became an issue in teacher contract negotiations.

According to a February 2010 intergovernmental agreement obtained through a Freedom of Information request by the Chicago Teachers Union, the district agreed to pay the police department $32.8 million or $8 million a year for these officers from 2009 thru the end of 2012. 

Then, last year, the new CPS leadership announced that CPS had been under-cutting the police department and owed it an additional $70 million. A CPS spokeswoman said the police officers actually cost about $25 million a year and Chief Administrative Officer Tim Cawley said the district had “no choice” but to pay.

But CTU leaders were suspicious. About the same time as CPS leaders announced they would pay the extra money to police, the Board of Education rescinded a promised 4 percent raise for teachers and other staff. The raises would cost the district $80 million, about the same amount as CPS was suddenly giving to the police department.

The union obtained a subsequent intergovernmental agreement---not signed until December of 2011—in which district officials agree to pay the police department $70.8 million more than called for in the original contract.

Recently, in the midst of teacher contract negotiations, CTU leadership accused the district of diverting money to the police department to get out of paying the raises. And an independent fact-finder noted that the union is still bitter about the rescinding of the raises and it weighs heavy into the contract negotiations.

CPS was awarded on Thursday a $25 million federal School Improvement Grant to perform what is called "transformation" on four high schools and to turnaround one.

Transformation is a process in which a newer principal works with an outside institution--sometimes a curriculum company or a university--to improve the school without firing all the staff, as in a turnaround. Transformation schools must extend learning time and analyze student data to improve instruction. 

The desire to use the transformation strategy might signal that CPS leaders are not convinced that turnarounds work in high schools. A recent study by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research showed that turnaround high schools showed initial improvements in student attendance, but, in other measures, did not make impressive progress.

At its meeting Thursday, the Illinois State Board of Education approved school improvement grants to do transformation for Clemente Community Academy, Bowen High School, Bogan High and Al Raby High. Chicago Vocational will undergo a turnaround. Outside of Chicago, East St. Louis Senior High and Cahokia High also are up for grants. Washington High School was originally on the list to be transformed, but was pulled at the last minute, according to ISBE spokeswoman Mary Fergus.

The ISBE board packet says Chicago Vocational Career Academy will be transformed, but CPS spokeswoman Robyn Ziegler says the packet is wrong and the school will be turned around as planned.  At the May Board of Education meeting, Principal Doug Maclin talked about the improvements he has been able to initiate since taking over last year--and without bringing in an entirely new staff. Maclin said student misconducts were down and attendance was up.

The $3.5 billion School Improvement Grant program is the federal initiative to try to improve the nation's lowest-performing schools. Al Raby and Bowen, which have fewer than 500 students, will receive about $2.6 million over three years. The other Chicago high schools, with more than 1,400 students each, will get $5.5 million.

Districts can choose one of three methods for reform: turnaround, transformation and restart, which entails a charter school operator taking over a school.

CPS is doing eight elementary school turnarounds this year and only one high school turnaround. CPS did not ask for SIG money for the elementary school turnarounds.

Last year was the first year CPS used the transformation method and, while it is too early for results, initial indicators show some progress. Transformation schools typically use the extra resources to provide more social-emotional and academic supports for students, such as social workers and writing coaches.

When Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the School Improvement Grant program, he considered transformation the least optimal of the three methods of reform because it doesn’t bring a cohort of fresh people into the school. However, transformation is by far the most popular of the reform methods, in part because of the difficulty of finding replacement teachers and staff in some communities.

One of the provisions of getting a School Improvement Grant is that the school must work with an outside entity. In an unusual set-up, CPS’ Office of School Improvement is an approved outside vendor and all the transformation schools on tap are slated to partner with the office.

At the same time, OSI is undergoing changes itself.  At a meeting last Saturday, CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said the office will no longer take on turnarounds. Instead, the unit will work with schools that are on academic probation and in danger of being targets for drastic action.

Brizard says the office will develop systems for schools to use when they are on the edge of failing. “We want them to put in place concrete processes that schools will be required to follow,” he said.

Brizard will also look for more outside organizations to do turnarounds. Currently, 12 turnaround schools are managed by the Academy of Urban School Leadership. In the past, CPS has looked for other groups to do turnarounds, including a charter school operator, but none has entered the picture.

 Of the 250 schools currently on probation, 150 have had that status for at least five years. 

He had announced in March that the city would open 10 new IB programs – five whole-school programs, including one at Back of the Yards and another at Senn High School in Edgewater – and five new programs in existing neighborhood high schools.

It was not immediately clear what the school’s enrollment policy would be. Brizard emphasized students would not have to test in, but said they would be chosen by their “drive and affinity with the program.” He said students in the neighborhood will get priority for enrollment.

After 10^th grade, students will be able to take individual IB classes (similar to Advanced Placement classes), pursue an IB diploma, or participate in a new IB career-education program.

When pressed on whether his get-tough school strategy had backfired, leading to Monday’s Chicago Teachers Union announcement of a landslide vote for strike authorization, Emanuel said that “my goal is to make sure we have an education system that puts our children first.”

He also touted recent agreements over McCormick Place and the police and firefighter wellness plans, as well as CPS’ agreements with SEIU and UNITE-HERE, as evidence that he is trying to build a collaborative relationship with the city’s unions.

Mayra Lopez, an organizer with the Resurrection Project, a Pilsen-based community development agency, says many in the community still have unanswered questions about how the school will serve students with average performance.

“Are all the students going to have to take IB? Is there going to be an alternative track? I don’t think a lot of the students in the neighborhood are prepared to go into an IB curriculum after 8^th grade,” she says.

And, she says, the school – which only has room for 1,200 students – will only be able to serve about half of the 600 8^th-grade students who graduate from Back of the Yards elementary schools each year.

“What happens to the rest of the students – are they still going to have to go to Richards and Tilden, and deal with the problems they had before?” she asks.