After being locked out in the cold, we made our voices heard [Updated]

Outside the church, crowd chants, "Let us in!" (M. Klonsky pic)

While hundreds of us were enduring the sub-freezing Chicago night, locked outside the Armitage Baptist Church in Logan Square, where the Fullerton Network School Utilization meeting had been called, I was remembering a similarly cold night in 1987 following the death of Mayor Harold Washington. That night we stood in the snow and cold, locked out of City Hall while the forces of darkness pulled off the coup d'etat that put the city back in the hands of the corrupt Democratic political machine, after its brief flirtation with democracy. But I knew that wasn't going to happen last night. We were going to get inside the meeting one way or another.

At the Logan Square Auditorium. (M. Klonsky pic)

The current movement to save our public schools also evokes memories of the movement that led to Harold's Election and beyond.

After rallying at the Logan Square Auditorium, we marched up Kedzie to the church. There we were forced to stand outside in the cold for close to an hour, a diverse shivering crowd, black, white and Latino neighborhood folks, lots of teachers and working class and middle-class moms, with kids in hand, chanting, "Let us in! Let us in!" That picture, those chants, tells you all you need to know about the nature of the growing battle over neighborhood  school closings.

If they thought the freezing wind would disperse us and send us home while they allowed a few to trickle into the church, they were wrong. Finally a nervous Ald. Waguespack showed up and I think it was he who pressured them to let us all inside. [Update: I have since been informed by a Goethe parent, that Waguespack was not at all involved in getting CPS to allow more people to enter. See comment below].

The CPS bureaucrats now had to face the brunt of the angry crowd, chanting, SAVE OUR SCHOOLS! and singing, "... Like a tree that's standing by the water, We shall not be moved." Apparently, they have become smarter since the first community protests began. First they trotted out the priest who warned the crowd to "be respectful" since we were now in "the house of God."  These "public" hearings are all being underwritten with private, pro-charter school Walton money. Holding hearings in a conservative Baptist church was obviously part of the game plan -- a way to divide the crowd.

Inside the church. (M. Klonsky pic)

The standing-room only crowd of about 700 was anything but disrespectful. Yes, we were loud, angry and determined not to lose our neighborhood schools to the charter operators and privatizers. But we were also there to engage with CPS. After the local pols had their say, one by one, the parents took the stage, representing Brentano, Darwin, Goethe, Ames and other local schools, research -- statistical and anecdotal-- in hand, every speech translated in English and Spanish, trying to convince the invisible powers that be, that their school  be saved from the CPS death list.

I imagine these same forces of darkness, having made the school system a wing of City Hall, are not resting easy over the emergence of this  new grassroots democratic movement. I'm certain Rahm and his boys are paying close attention.

The word is that tomorrow, they will put out their list of schools they want to close. If the past is any prelude, they will try and divide the movement by backing off some of the schools where the loudest and most militant opposition has been organized. It that's the case, I suspect that at least some of the well-organized Logan Square schools will saved.

I left the meeting hoping that things move to the next level -- from Save our school, to Save OUR SCHOOLS. Then we will really have something.