Closing Neighborhood Schools, Like Daley Closed Neighborhood Saloons, Is Part of the Small Global City Plan

19th Ward parents packed the Beverly Arts Center to help find a solution to CPS' problems.

Richard M. Daley closed more saloons than Billy Sunday, Frances Willard and Carie Nation combined.

Daley closed neighborhood bars and used 'public safety' as an excuse.  He gamed the ordinances that would permanently void a liquor license, citing residential complaints, noise and public urination. Fights happen in bars to be sure.  But they also happen anywhere. There are more brawls in Walmart than saloons and Chuck-e - Cheese is the place to go for a swell brawl. Daley closed taverns so people would no longer have a place talk sense over a pitcher, or two.

Rahm Emanuel is closing neighborhood schools to kill neighborhoods.  CPS has been ignoring 'residency' rules for decades.  Kids from Austin attend Morgan Park High School, no biggie.

Well when CPS closes neighborhood schools within cross-over Disciple/Gangster Disciple/ Stones/ Four Corner Hustler turf in Gresham, Brainerd, Chatham, Washington Heights, & etc., there are problems a plenty.  A grammar school aged kid living in an apartment in a two flat on 7900 S. Morgan may have to cross four gang turfs to one of the five ( Oglesby, Stagg, Wescott, Cuffee, or Gresham).

Now, there is a growing concern of parents in the 19th Ward about CPS closing and consolidating neighborhood schools that work the way schools are supposed to work.

Rahm Emanuel's City Hall and Forrest Claypool's CPS dictum is the same - if it works and not fixed break it.
 Parents and teachers say this -

Stop the closing of neighborhood schools. It may not be happening in your area now, but you never know when it's coming. We were blindsided by a proposal to close a high performing neighborhood school to relieve overcrowding at another. Let's make sure ALL students get the space they need, while not sacrificing our neighborhood schools! 19th Ward News

The 19th Ward is one of very places in this city where black and white neighbors get along very well and behave like neighbors to one another.  No rules, or ordinances; just civility and Christian charity.

Can't have that in a Global City!

Here's the thing - Mount Greenwood School has a capacity for 990 kids and it is at over 1,100 kids.

There is no undeveloped earth upon which to expand the campus. It is over-populated - way past filled up.

Alderman Matt O'Shea offers this solution in Howard Ludwig's solid report for DNAinfo Chicago:

O'Shea said there is no more room to build at Mount Greenwood Elementary, which can accommodate 990 students. That's why he's proposing the school take over the campus of the Keller Regional Gifted Center, which is just 3½ blocks away at 3020 W. 108th St.
Keller would be moved to 9241 S. Leavitt St., now the home of Kate S. Kellogg Elementary School. O'Shea has said that Kellogg and nearby Sutherland elementary school in Beverly have seen declining enrollment by neighborhood residents in recent years. So O'Shea wants to merge the two schools on Sutherland's campus at 10015 S. Leavitt St.

The merger would be phased in over roughly three years. O'Shea said he believes Sutherland, built to accommodate 504-756 students, can handle the merger, particularly as enrollment is projected to continue to decline.

I don't know where these projections come from but I can tell you that my daily polling of little guys, toddlers, infants and  moms large-with-child from my wide neighborhood perambulations, indicate that 19th Ward neighborhood schools will continue to swell like a thirsty tick for good decade or more.  School crowding should be a happy concern, but this is Rahm's Chicago, where neighborhood means racism and community means 'it's all good!'

The charge of racism is answer to every problem.  Because Kellogg is 83 % African American and suffers a declining enrollment, while its immediate neighbor Christ the King Catholic School is majority and doing nicely, racism must be at the core.  The Chicago Tribune launched into race-baiting immediately.

Ald. Matt O'Shea, whose plan to reconfigure schools within the 19th Ward has drawn criticism from some residents, took a different tack when explaining the controversial proposal Monday — presenting it as crucial to freeing up money to renovate crumbling Esmond Elementary, a nearly all-black, low-income school in Morgan Park that he called "the greatest need in our community."
He opened the evening's presentation of his plan to relocate or consolidate four elementary schools in his district by rolling out staff from Esmond, which is not part of the restructuring plan, to detail the substandard conditions at their building and plead for help. . . .Community members expressed alarm that the plan — which seeks to merge two high-performing majority black schools in Beverly to accommodate a predominantly white school in Mount Greenwood — had concerning racial overtones.

"I can tell you our community, yet diverse, is also very segregated," Shanya Gray, a Kellogg parent, said. "One of the things that it truly appears is that you are sacrificing black students because of the white students, which may not be the case, but I will tell you it appears that way."

Parents also argued that the racial and economic diversity of a merged school would suffer since, under O'Shea's plan, the Options for Knowledge program, which currently enables non-neighborhood kids from more impoverished areas to attend either Kellogg or Sutherland, would be discontinued.

Lindbloom was a neighborhood high school; it is now a 'selective enrollment' high school for the children of privilege.  Try getting your kid into Lindbloom and good luck.  CPS works for the Magnets and selective enrollment academies and lab schools.  Neighborhood schools can go pound sand, until they close.

Like Daley with saloons, Rahm's destruction of neighborhoods cuts brush for  Chicago -A Global City.  Empty of middle class.

As things stand, Alderman O'Shea and parents of the schools want to see a fair and intelligent solution to overcrowded schools in Mount Greenwood and schools with declining enrollments a few miles to the east.  Bad schools, closed schools and no schools help destroy neighborhoods for the community.  The community of bankers, real restate players and race hustling creeps also want a Global City   The people of the 19th Ward neighborhoods want to do right by their children. But, this is Chicago and Rahm wants Chicago on the fast track to Small City Global Village on the Lake.  Real Estate, banking and race-baiting creeps will do all in their to help the little man get what he wants.