Friday April 1 All Day, Everywhere  

Join families, students, teachers, workers, and all those who thirst for justice.

More than 100,000 workers in the state of Illinois are out of a contract and are bargaining directly with our adversaries—Governor Bruce Rauner, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, bankers and billionaires like Ken Griffin, who are calling for school closings, university closings, budget cuts, lower wages for workers and restrictions on collective bargaining.

Racial injustice fuels the prison industrial complex by sending poor Black and brown men and women to prison each day. Chronic disinvestment has caused poverty in the state to grow considerably. Law enforcement agencies are under federal scrutiny for the murder of unarmed people and the mentally ill. Child-care workers and low-income parents are under attack. Yet multimillion-dollar arenas, museums and millionaire condos are being built all around us.

Tax cuts for those with the highest incomes, an unfair, regressive flat-tax system, and corporate loopholes galore have put Illinois in this fiscal distress. In Chicago, the mayor refuses to renegotiate bad deals with the banks profiting off of our “broke on purpose” schools. The mayor's TIF program siphons money from schools, parks, libraries and other public needs and hands it to wealthy developers. Rahm's handpicked board of education wastes millions on excessive testing and mismanagement while they cut and cut from school budgets. Enough is enough!

On Friday, November 2, a spirited crowd of 100 parents, teachers, students, and community members held a rally and press conference at City Hall demanding a moratorium-of at least two years-on all school closings, turnarounds, consolidations, and phase-outs. After the rally we sat in at the Mayor's office, refusing to leave until we had a meeting scheduled with the Mayor (no surrogates). That never happened, as one of his staff claimed she "couldn't do that." Outside supporters held a candlelight vigil. At 10PM the police threatened all those remaining. Ten parents, teachers, and community members were arrested and charged with trespassing. They spent the night in the police lock up (those arrested were CTU teachers and retired teachers, and members of KOCO, STOP, and TSJ, including LSC members), while a group waited for them all night at police headquarters.

This is just the opening move to make it clear to the Mayor and the powers-that-be in the city that people will no longer play by CPS rules just to have, in the end, another round of devastating closings and privatization of public schools.

CPS has talked about closing up to 100 public schools this year. At the same time CPS committed to the Gates Foundation to open 60 new charter schools and 40 new contract and turnaround schools in the next 5 years.

No more!

See photos from the sit-in here.

Video links of the arrests here  and here.

Here is a playlist of videos taken inside the sit-in, including interviews with CPS parent and LSC member Jeanette Taylor Smith and CPS teachers Carrene Beverly-Bass and Lillian Kass, as well as footage of CTU members leading folks in Ella's Song. 

Suntimes article here.

And check out our FB page for more! 

And PLZ! pre-register for the Curriculum Fair! Make everyone's life easier!