School's out

Chicago Public Schools recently announced the closing of 54 school programs and 61 school buildings in what is the largest single group of school closures in United States history.

This mass closure affects 30,000 students, thousands of teachers and dozens of communities.

The rationale behind Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and his incredibly destructive, near inhumane decision for “reform” was Chicago’s “billion dollar deficit,” as most of the schools closing are considered failed in programming, and “underutilized.”

CPS would allegedly save a little more than half of that deficit in this closure.

The unavoidable fact of this epidemic is the majority of these schools are in low-income areas, primarily catering to African-American and Latino demographics.

In the 100 schools closed in Chicago since 2001, 88 percent of the students affected were black. Coincidence?

For too long, lower-class families have been cheated out of their educational opportunities, their resources and the attention they need to succeed in school or in their later careers.

The widespread effect of these closures not only shuts down all these communities, but it forecloses on the potential of each individual student.

These closures have asked for all individuals to bear an incredibly unfair burden, no matter the alleged money it can save. This plan is an explicit systemization of racism.

Why, when creating a budget, will a state government look and say, “Yeah, education for the underprivileged. That’s the first thing to go.”

While parents and teachers quake in anticipation of their community’s reformation, Mayor Emmanuel is away on a skiing vacation.

It makes us sick looking at the map of the closure to see that this plan is not so much a safe relocation as it is a controlled prairie fire, shattering the infrastructure of these respective communities for the sake of rebuilding things from the ground.

This out-of-touch plan relocates children using spreadsheets and data, but that leaves many outlying questions for individuals.

If the school is the center of a community, what happens to the community when you take it away?

What is the likelihood that kids in these “underutilized schools” will get the attention and expansion they need to succeed?

What happens to the class size of existing schools? Though these students are relocating, how many teachers lose their jobs?

How many students, who have neither the ability to relocate nor the parents who care, will drop out of school to save the trouble? How many new gang lines will students have to cross in this relocation?

Last month, while addressing the issues of gun violence in one of his home cities, President Barack Obama said “no law or set of laws can prevent every senseless act of violence in this country. When a child opens fire on another child, there is a hole in that child’s heart that government can’t fill, only community ...

“In too many neighborhoods today, whether here in Chicago or the farthest reaches of rural America, it can feel like, for a lot of young people, the future only extends to the next street corner or the outskirts of town, that no matter how much you work or how hard you try, your destiny was determined the moment you were born,” he said.

This plan for closure perpetuates the idea that the kids in these schools are federally considered second-class citizens, and that there is no hope for their ascension because their world is futile and should stay futile.

This plan for closure illuminates a larger principle for public schools across the country that are grossly underfunded.

This plan is an underdeveloped idea, as is almost any closure decision made for public schools.

If schools need to close, every question must be answered. The life of every single parent and student needs to be thought out, as individuals that need help, not as vague clouds of people that need to be dissipated.

There needs to be more rhyme or reason when lives are at stake.

826CHI is a nonprofit writing and tutoring center that caters to the needs of Chicago’s public and private schools because they believe in the potential of each individual student.

These programs seek to give kids their voices when they are denied their say in cases like these. For those that are affected, there are loads of free after-school tutoring programs like 826CHI that cater to the needs of these kids.

For those that want to take action, a rally to stop school closings will take place at 4 p.m. Wednesday in Daley Plaza in downtown Chicago.

We are individuals and not anything short of that. Cherish and defend your child’s public education.