Gale Elementary School in Rogers Park is being starved out by Chicago Public School officials.
Funding for the school has been cut by over $300,000, which will lead to the firing of the librarian and tech instructor. Poisonous lead paint is chipping from the ceilings. There is no reliable heating. And the school has no money to buy books!
I urge you, right now, as a small but very significant step, to contribute to the Gale School book drive by visiting this link now. https://www.crowdrise.com/gale. Pressure on local officials and CPS leaders is also needed to make sure that the lead is cleaned up this summer.
Located in a poor community where 93 percent of the students live under the poverty line, Gale School is an irreplaceable source of much needed public funding for the community. Yet CPS is threatening to shutter the school.
In fact, CPS has adopted a new per-pupil funding scheme that is in reality just another sneaky way to make it easier to close schools like Gale in poor neighborhoods.
Here’s how the cynical scheme works: Students leave the under funded school in search of better facilities which leads to less funding. The cycle is repeated until CPS says something like, as it did in the closing of 50 schools in poor neighborhoods last year, “We need to close Gale because it is ‘underutilized.’”
Gale School is not alone. It is just one example. Mayor Emanuel’s hand-picked school board is creating a segregated school system of run-down public schools for mostly Black and Latino students and a corporate-funded charter system that lacks public accountability and cannot, by its very corporate-sponsored nature, be expected to deliver an equal education to all students any more than charter school backers like McDonald’s and Walmart can be expected, on their own, to deliver a livable wage to workers.
The truth: CPS is building more elite schools, sanctioning more charter schools and closing neighborhood schools in mostly Black and Latino areas with the intention of providing a quality education to only a portion of our youth while channeling tens of thousands into low wage jobs and the prison system.
How else can you explain CPS’ criminality in allowing lead to poison Gale Elementary school students?
I say, the kids at Gale are our kids too. We cannot let the war on our youth continue. Not without a fight.
The privatization of the school system, backed, again, by forces like Microsoft, McDonald’s and Walmart, cannot be trusted to provide an equal education for all. Why should we hand over our kids to these notorious labor exploiters? We shouldn’t. We should fight for a 100 percent public school system with a well funded, guaranteed education for every single student.
