Black and Latino leaders from several Local School Councils crowded the sidewalk in front of the Chicago Board of Education offices Wednesday to oppose Mayor Richard M. Daley's desire to strip the councils of the ability to hire and fire principals.
"City Hall's proposed action would disenfranchise the largest group of minority elected officials in the state, and the nation, and the people who elected them," said Eric Outten, an LSC vice-chair at Burnside Scholastic Academy.
According to a report released by South Side United Local School Council Federal at the rally, LSCs in Chicago contain significant numbers of Blacks, Latinos and Asians elected to hold the office. The combined numbers of the three groups in the city is 3,750. The total for Blacks, Asians and Latinos on the remaining 900 school boards statewide is just 380, with 5,600 white members, according to the report.
The mayor also is trying to grab control of jobs for principals at 550 schools and millions of dollars in salaries, charged South Side United leaders. City hall has enough corruption problems and can't be allowed to go back to handing out school jobs based on patronage or political connections, they added.
Daley broached the idea of taking hiring and firing ability away from LSCs after a controversy over the dismissal of Jerryelyn Jones, the highly regarded principal at Curie High School, Daley condemned the March decision by a Latino majority on the Curie LSC to depose the African American principal. He called the vote racist and a "national disgrace." Jones has appealed the decision and the case is in arbitration.
Local School Councils need to be left alone, advocates say.
"We have a problem with the possibility of central office, through the mayor's office, taking power away from Local School Councils in choosing their principals," said Eben Credit, of South Side United. "When you're talking about taking the right to chose from Local School Councils, you're not just talking about those 12 people. Those 12 people represent the community as a whole legally," he said.
If you count nearly 400,000 mostly Black and Latino public school students and their parents, you talking about taking away the rights of about one million people, Credit argued.
"The school board simply wants to centralize control of the principal appointments and go back to the old system of principal patronage where we had principals being assigned to plum schools just to retire and friends of downtown just sitting there to have a job as opposed to being accountable to the local community, to the parents and the students of that school," said Outten.
The school board's central office has failed to help LSCs and LSCs are never called on to help with back to school efforts, violence prevention of academic achievement, he complained.
University of Chicago research shows 83 percent of principals believe LCSs help schools improve and over half of LSCs were rated "high functioning", and 30 percent were rated "performing well but need support," said South Side United.
"The proposals that the mayor and board of education have been shopping around with legislators would critically weaken the links between schools and communities when we need everyone to work together to improve our schools and radically decrease violence," said Outten.
LSCs, created by state law in 1988, are responsible for the onsite management of city public schools, which includes selecting school principals, approving plans to improve school academics and approving the school's budget. The idea was to put more control and power over education into the hands of local people. The ability to hire and fire principals for renewable four-year contracts represents significant power for LSCs, which hold elections every two years, on even numbered years. LSCs are composed of six parents, two community representatives, two teachers, principals, and students in high schools.
Rally participants didn't comment on the Curie controversy, except to say that the process outlined in the law is underway. The entire system should not be changed because of one LSCs decision, they said. Nothing should change because the system is working, said Valencia Rias, of Designs For Change, an education advocacy group and rally organizer. The mayor and Chicago Public School leadership want to intervene now, but they have never acted when principals at low performing schools were rehired year after year, she said.
State legislators and aldermen asked to oppose mayor. Rally organizers have contacted some state legislators and aldermen, but plan to mount a campaign to derail the mayor's plan. A state legislator would have to offer changes to state law to take away LSC hiring and firing power. Advocates fear the change could be tucked away in a late minute, late night legislative act.
"The only way we can stop the types of backroom maneuvers that are possible in Springfield is to contact all of our state legislators and tell them not to let this last minute manipulation happen," said Al Rogers, an LCS member at Morrill Elementary School and Gage Park High School. Rogers has been an unpaid public education advocate for 18 years.
"If the Chicago Board wants to change the law, we must ask our representatives to demand that the Chicago Board does it in the legislative session next spring with public hearing in Chicago," Rogers said.
The fight could also offer new city council members an opportunity to show how deep their commitment to change runs, when they asked to buck the mayor.
Given city bond issues for school construction, each alderman has a stake in the LSC discussions, Rogers observed. "Each and every alderman does have a point to make and they (school board officials) listen," he said.
[Author Affiliation]
by Richard Muhammad
Defender Contributing Writer
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