Progress Illinois

Nearly 500 participants in the statewide Parent Mentor Program “graduated” Tuesday morning, as they successfully completed at least one semester of assisting teachers and students in the classroom.

The event marks the first parent mentor graduation since the program expanded across Illinois last spring. From 28 schools last year, to 59 today, trained parents are incorporated into more than 400 classrooms statewide, from Moline to Aurora.

Attendees, numbering roughly 700, also celebrated the reallocation of a $1 million grant from the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE).

The event was hosted at Charles Darwin Elementary School — which had 18 parents graduate — on Chicago’s Northwest Side in Logan Square.

“Many moms, especially immigrant moms like myself, they don’t know how to approach the school, but the Parent Mentor Program opens the doors of the school and they are more likely to bridge some of the barriers they might face in every day life,” said Leticia Barrera, 40, education organizer for the Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA). Read more »

West Side education activists say they have a new tactic to stop school closings in Chicago. The plan involves filing stacks of parent complaints with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.

The strategy is centered around the adverse affects the school closings will have on disabled and African-American students, said Elce Redmond with the South Austin Community Coalition.

The plan aims to mobilize the community and further expose how closing 50 neighborhood schools, concentrated on the South and West Sides, will impact children. Redmond said the goal is to send busloads of people to deliver the complaints to the civil rights office in Chicago and possibly have people go to Washington.

"We want to go to the Department of Education and say, 'Listen, based on these complaints, we have a very serious crisis here,'" Redmond said at a West Side community meeting Thursday night. "And a serious crisis that as a federal government, who is supposedly in charge of protecting young people, you have to step in and do something." Read more »