Lane Baseball Head Coach Dean Stavrakas. Credit: Lane Tech Baseball.org

Lane Tech head varsity baseball coach Dean Stavrakas announced his resignation on Tuesday. Stavrakas  has won 453 games and 13 section titles in his head coaching career at Hales, St Benedict, Lake View, and Lane.

Stavrakas guided Lane to back-to-back section titles winning 27 CPS conference games.

The Indians finished 24-10 this past season. They lost the Public League Playoffs to Simeon and the Illinois playoffs to Notre Dame High School.

“It was probably the greatest opportunity in coaching I’ve had at any level.” Stavrakas said. “It was a marvelous opportunity to work with these kids at Lane.”

Stavrakas resigned to focus on his cleaning business, Kleen Teem. Kleen Teem offers event cleanup in Ft Lauderdale and Chicago. It is known for its work with the Pitchfork Festival.

Dean’s son, George, coaches the men’s and women’s softball teams at Lane. The women’s softball team won a school record 20 games in a row heading by winning the Chicago Public League championship this season. It was the Seventh Straight Public League Championship won by Lane.

*** UPDATED June 14, 2013 11.30A **** A previous version of this story had stated that George Stavrakas was a teacher at Lane Tech. He has left his teaching position at Lane, but retains his coaching position.  In addition, the earlier version of this post had said the men’s softball team had won a record 20 games in a row and the Chicago Public League championship. It was the women’s team that had the outstanding record that was noted. The Bulldog apologizes for the errors. The errors happened in the editing, not the writing of the story. ***

Catholic League Rivals Gordon Tech and St. Ignatius in 2013

The Chicago Catholic League announced yesterday that five schools from the now defunct Suburban Christian Conference—Aurora Christian, Marian Central Catholic, Marmion Academy, Montini Catholic and St. Francis of Wheaton—will join the CCL for football and soccer only starting with the 2014-2015 seasons. The Catholic League will expand from 15 to 20 schools. The five new teams will form a fourth division. The new Green Division will join the existing Blue, White and Red divisions. The divisions are roughly divided by enrollment and program strength. The Blue Division consists of some of the strongest football programs in the state of Illinois, Loyola, Mt. Carmel, St. Rita, Providence and Brother Rice, and will remain as is.

The White Division will be slightly different with Fenwick moving to the new Green Division. Aurora Christian from the Suburban Christian Conference will join the White Division. The new Green Division will consist of Suburban Christian Conference converts Marian Central Catholic, Marmion Academy, Montini Catholic and St. Francis of Wheaton plus Fenwick from the CCL’s White Division.

The Red Division, which includes the City’s only northside Catholic League member, Gordon Tech College Prep, (Loyola Academy is in Wilmette), will remain unchanged.

The divisional alignments for soccer have yet to be determined but will be based on geography and parity.

The 100 year old Chicago Catholic League is considered by most observers as one of the strongest, if not the strongest football conference in the state. It will only be stronger with the addition of the new schools. Three of the eight reigning state champions will be from the CCL. The CCL includes the reigning state 8A football champion, Mt. Carmel and semi-finalist Loyola Academy. The CCL adds two more reigning state champions, Montini in 5A and Aurora Christian in 3A.

Although none of the new teams will join the Red Division, the impact on Gordon Tech will be felt immediately. According to Gordon Tech’s Athletic Director Paul Chabura, the addition of a game against a Green Division team will fill an existing week eight hole in GT’s schedule. The new scheduling format will have CCL teams play four games against teams in their division and three games against one team from each of the other divisions, plus two non-conference games against during the first two weeks of the season. By the 2014 season Gordon will probably schedule one of the new teams.

Catholic League president and St. Ignatius athletic director, Jim Prunty told the Bulldog that the addition Aurora Christian, a non-denominational Christian school, into the “Catholic” League will not be an issue. The principals of the CCL member schools have signed off on adding Aurora Christian. The CCL added Lake Forest Academy, a private non-religious school, last year to the Red Division.

RebootIllinois presents an info graphic of the contrasting pension plans. Credit: RebootIllinois.com

Dueling pension plans will have a final shootout in Springfield this week as a looming legislative deadline will lead to adoption of a plan by either Illinois Senate President John Cullerton or Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.

The Cullerton plan was negotiated with public employee unions. The Chicago Sun-Times projects the plan would save $6 billion towards the $100 billion state pension shortfall. However savings estimates vary, with the RebootIllinois site estimating Cullerton’s plan would save $46 billion over 30 years.

The Madigan plan would save an estimated $30 billion, but lacks union support, the Sun-Times notes. RebootIllinois says the Madigan plan would save $150 billion over 30 years.

Cullerton predicted his plan would pass the House with about 85 votes. Senator Heather Steans voted against the Cullerton plan which passed the Senate 40-16 on May 9.

Madigan’s plan passed the House in a May 2 vote 62-51. Representatives Kelly Cassidy and Ann Williams voted against the measure. Representatives Greg Harris and Sara Feigenholtz voted in favor of Madigan’s plan.

The plan was postponed by a Senate vote of 30-22. Cullerton voted to postpone the Madigan proposal. Sen. Heather Steans voted present on motion to postpone.

Cullerton, who has been described as ‘violently opposed’ to concealed carry, has promoted a more restrictive law. The Chicago Tribune, in a report, says the Senate version of the gun law would not allow weapons in many places serving alcohol that would be permissible under the House version.

Cullerton’s bill is backed by key local politicians including Governor Pat Quinn, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The Cullerton proposal would allow more restrictive local legislation, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Senate President told reporters last week he was working to defeat a bill supported by Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. The Illinois House approved a bill 85-30 to allow concealed carry last week.

Tuesday the Senate Executive Committee voted to reject the House proposal. However, the Capitolfax.com Blog predicts the overwhelming support for a revised gun law in the House has moved Cullerton to support compromises that would eliminate home rule exemptions.

Local Democrats led opposition to the bill in the House.

“Home-rule exists because our communities are different, because we’re a big state with a great deal of regional diversity. There is no reason to take out local laws that are related to other gun-related issues,” Rep. Kelly Cassidy told the Peoria Journal Star.

I “remain disappointed that the House passed a concealed carry bill that nullifies municipal gun regulations. I understand that the court-order to pass a law by June 9 should be honored, but municipalities deserve to have home rule when it comes to public safety issues,” Rep. Sara Feigenholtz said on her Facebook page Saturday.

Cassidy and Feigenholtz joined Representatives Greg Harris and Ann Williams in opposing passage of the House gun bill.

Madigan indicated to the News-Gazette he expected the Senate to pass the House version of the bill over the objection of Cullerton. “I think if the bill is called in the Senate, I think we’ll get a vote in the Senate comparable to the vote it got today, which was an overwhelming supermajority vote,” Madigan told the News-Gazette.

We are writing you to urge you to reconsider the closing of Trumbull Elementary School in Andersonville. There are several factors that lead us to believe that CPS is making the wrong decision in proposing the school for closure.

1. We have a new Principal and newly elected Local School Council. Our Principal started last school year, and the new LSC has been in office since July 1, 2012. In that short time test scores have increased dramatically. Initial data supports another large increase in our ISAT scores this year, and we fully expect the upward trend to continue.
2. We have a large Special Education (SPED) program. In fact, the 146 special education students make up 37% of our student population. These children’s progress depends on consistent and familiar behaviors. Splitting these children between three schools, and interrupting their routine pattern will be detrimental to their progress. In fact, studies have shown that when SPED students are relocated to new schools, on average they lose anywhere from 12-18 months of progress. I would also argue that because the SPED test scores at Trumbull are higher than our receiving schools, those students are not given the opportunity to attend a higher performing school.

2. Utilization data is inaccurate for Trumbull. It has been widely reported and substantiated by CPS that the formula used to determine a school’s utilization did not include “guardrails” for schools that had a high percentage of Special Education students. When our SPED program is accounted for, we are always over 80%, which means that according to Barbara Byrd-Bennett, we are “optimally utilized” and should be removed from the list.

We are the typical Andersonville family. For the first time last week, we began talking about moving. It’s a heartbreaking decision. We just moved back to Chicago a couple years ago, and love living in the city. We love our neighborhood and have invested in our schools and our community. Andersonville has become a part of our family. We thought we would raise our children here. If Trumbull closes we face the uncertainty of our son getting into Peirce, and therefore we don’t know that we can stay. We are one of numerous other families in this community who are also being forced to rethink their future in Chicago because of this proposal. Our lives are being turned upside-down.

Please consider these factors. Please support our neighborhood. Please don’t close our school, Trumbull Elementary.

Sincerely,

Ali and Paul Burke

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).

This post originally appeared in Catalyst-Chicago and is republished with permission. Read the original

• CPS attempted to manipulate the news cycle in an effort to control damage from the findings of the hearing officers
• CPS fulfilled the letter of the law, but not its spirit
• Two CEO’s of CPS have been brought in for specialized purpose. Those purposes were not associated with education

We can think of no better summary of the school closings than this: The Chicago Public Schools are arrogant.

We can think of no better reason for an elected school board than this: The Chicago Public Schools are arrogant.

Late on Monday, after the media repeatedly asked for release of the documents, the reports of the independent hearing officers were released. The release happened about midnight, past the 10P news, past the deadline for all the Sun-Times newspaper editions and past most of the press deadlines for the Chicago Tribune.

It happened late enough that early morning radio and television news, typically manned by a small staff, would struggle to review the material in a thoughtful way for the Tuesday morning broadcast.

We praise our colleagues, particularly at WBEZ, Catalyst and other sites, which were able to digest the material and explain it to the public in a timely manner.

Why did it happen this way? In part CPS wanted to control the news cycle.

But in part, the curious timing of the release of documents just before midnight fulfills a statutory requirement of CPS to publish the reports of the public hearing officer 15 days prior to any Board action. Releasing the material at midnight was legally the same as releasing the material at 8A Monday. Both times would allow CPS to legally meet the minimum requirement demanded of it by law.

Clearly one time is within the spirit of the law. The later time is only within the letter of the law.

But that is CPS.

What CPS did not want the public to discuss until as late as possible was that independent hearing officers had recommended against nearly 20 percent of school closings. One of the schools that concerns were expressed about was Stockton/ Courtenay. In neighboring Uptown another problematic school was Stewart.

CPS is challenging the ability of the hearing officers to express an opinion on school closings.

Here is how the Tribune discussed CPS’s objections: “CPS said the hearing officers were charged only with finding if the district complied with state law in deciding which schools to close.”

CPS told the Tribune it believes the hearing officers ‘acted outside their authority.’

It is interesting CPS mentioned that. Here is the law, 105 ILCS 5/34-230(f)(4):

The independent hearing officer shall issue a written report that summarizes the hearing and determines whether the chief executive officer complied with the requirements of this Section and the guidelines.

In other words CPS believes the law should read like this:

“The independent hearing officer shall issue a written report that determines whether the chief executive officer complied with the requirements of this Section and the guidelines.”

Let’s put it another way: CPS doesn’t want any opposition to its closing plans. It HAD to sit through meetings with the public because the law said it did. But it never had to interact with the public. There is no law requiring CPS to interact with the public.

There is only one citizen it worries about: Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

There are revolts beginning on the Chicago Board of Education, the appointed government body that is responsible for CPS. And now there are signs of unrest from an independent outside group of former judges.

Someone forgot to share the script with the public, the CBOE and the outside judges. Watch for those CBOE placeholders to be replaced with someone more compliant.

While CPS has trumpeted the tens of thousands of public members who spoke at public hearings and the thousands more who attended as a success it has refused to engage. It has refused to answer questions. It has acted in an arrogant manner to stifle public debate, going so far as to require principals to report to it the names of parents, staff, the public and the media who have asked questions.

It has faced parents emotional and reasoned objections with silence. Now it is facing the objections of the independent hearing officers by trying to delete three important words from state law: “…summarizes the hearing…”

Look at the hash it has made of the last year. We are speaking of a teachers strike and the school closings.

It should be obvious that the current CEO’s expertise is closing schools. It is equally obvious that the previous CEO only had expertise in union busting. What will be the narrow focus of the next CEO?

We’d like to think it would be educating children.

There was a push for an elected board of education several months ago. It is time. There is no better example of the need for an elected board than the arrogance of this mayor and of this public entity than that presented in the past year.

Read the CPS Counsel’s discussion of why you shouldn’t pay attention to hearing officers who acted outside their authority

An independent hearing officer has recommended closing Trumbull School. Credit: Patrick Boylan

A report from an independent hearing officer has recommended Trumbull school be closed at the end of the school year.

Judge Gilbery J Grossi (ret.) citing testimony from principals, teachers, parents and crossing guards and others at receiving schools said there was evidence students would be accepted at receiving schools.

“Several concerns, topics and proposals were suggested by the public,” Grossi noted. “These concerns were passionate and thoughtful.”

However, Grossi said CPS proposals had dealt with public concerns.

“I found the following testimony significant,” Grossi writes, noting:

• Joel Piotrowski, Asst. Principal of McCutcheon said the school is safe and diverse.
• Jenn Farrell, McCutcheon Principal has a great special education program and is safe.
• Agnes Green, a security guard at McCutcheon reported no gangs at McCutcheon.
• Mike Carlson, LSC President at McPherson reported McPherson has a strong special education effort.

Michael (Mike) Carlson has contributed articles to The Welles Park Bulldog.

Read the Hearing Officer’s Report

The hearing officer summarized two issues regarding closing the Courtenay building and merging the students into Stockton.

First, the hearing officer, Judge Charles R Winkler (ret)., noted students will be taking a new route to a new school. In the report Winkler says 475 Stockton students. Although Stockton will become Courtenay, it is the Courtenay students who are moving. Winkler actually mentions another school , Stewart, that will be impacted by the closing and moving to an Uptown school further east.

It is not clear whether he is confused or if he feels the Stewart closing will impact the decision on Courtenay and Stockton.

Winkler says the Chicago Public Schools should delay closings as a safety plan will not be in place until late August 2013. “Since a definitive safe plan will not be ready,” the report says, “will an understaffed Chicago Police Department be able to provide enough officers to assist the children?”

Winkler recommended that as a result of the safety considerations the implementation of the CPS proposal be delayed for one year.

Second, Winkler was impressed by the many parents asking that Courtenay remain intact. “CPS should address and consider the plea to keep the Courtenay model intact: a 100% enrollment without boundaries.”

Read the entire report by the independent hearing officer

A mural on the wall of Courtenay School. Credit: Patrick Boylan

Chicago Public Schools had indicated McCutcheon School will be a receiving school for 88 students from Trumbull School. Yet, CPS figures indicated McCutcheon has room for just 47 students.

Moreover, CPS figures indicated McCutcheon’s capacity would increase to 750 from 420.

The Bulldog spent several stories trying to unfold the secret behind the dramatic increase in McCutcheon capacity. The photos here show the building CPS believes can accommodate an additional 330 students.

James Morgan, a Trumbull School Local School Council member, told The Bulldog he believes the annex will only be used for students in upper grades. The main school is located one block east adjacent to Buttercup Park.