catalyst-chicago.org

CPS faces more intensive state monitoring following a ruling that the district isn’t doing a good enough job helping students transition from Early Intervention services into preschool special education.

STORY CORRECTED TO REFLECT UPDATED INFORMATION--More than 40 community-based preschool providers around the city will lose preschool funding under the city’s “Ready to Learn” preschool competition, an effort to shift preschool seats to high-quality programs in neighborhoods where they are needed.

In January 2012, CPS officials and visiting dignitaries from Target Corp. swarmed into Cardenas Elementary in Little Village – one of eight schools that became part of the Children’s Literacy Initiative through an Investing in Innovation grant awarded in 2010.

With the program set to expand to three more schools with funding from Target, classrooms were on display. One visitor, Stephen Zrike Jr., chief of schools for the Pilsen-Little Village Elementary Network, noted the impact of the initiative. He called the amount of reading and writing being done by Cardenas students “unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”