UNO On the March!

By now, people have heard that UNO at St. Scholastica has a hearing on Monday night to become UNO Rogers Park, which means that they want to add a high school in the fall of 2013.

I'll credit this photographer when I figure out who it was!

There's plenty more to say, but time is short. For now, suffice it to say that I'm opposed to it, and that when RPNPS meets this weekend, it is very likely the first issue on our agenda.

Let me just say this. I live in Rogers Park, but I work in Skokie. If some kind of entrepreneur were planning a publicly funded, privately managed school in Skokie, the community would have plenty of notice about the Board hearing.

There would also be plenty of other in situ  opportunities for people to have a dialogue.

But this is Chicago. You get this one little moment to have your two minutes before a Board that's accountable to someone else.

It takes two hearings, plus two community meetings for CPS to close a school--- that's in the law, and the law is intended to force a dialogue-based, collaborative process. Never mind that CPS has made an open mockery of the law's intentions, at least there's a law in place. But when a charter operator wants to insert a school in a neighborhood, there's a barely known-about hearing downtown and nothing in the neighborhood.  And then the charter operator calls up the mayor and says something like, "Dang, it's great to be politically connected!"

By the way, if you missed Byron Sigcho's discussion of UNO's financial model, it's online.

It isn't right.

Come to the hearing Monday night!

Hearing #4 from 6pm - 7pm (sign in 5pm -6:15pm):

Change the name of the UNO Northside Elementary School Campus to the UNO Rogers Park Campus, add grades 9-12 at the UNO Rogers Park Campus starting in the Fall of 2013.

The hearing will be held at the Chicago Board of Education Chambers, 125 S. Clark St., 5th floor.  Anyone who would like to submit written comment may submit them to the Office of New Schools, 125 S. Clark St., 10th floor or call 773-553-1530.  The record will remain open for these comments until 5pm Tuesday, April 15.