CPS response to sexual abuse scandal is just what you'd expect

CPS BUTT COVERERS:  Board Pres. Frank Clark, CEO Janice Jackson, and Board V.P. Jaime Guzman

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his hand-picked school board have responded to the ongoing CPS sex-abuse scandal in the same ass-covering way we've come to expect. It can be summed up as follows:

• Create another new department in the bloated bureaucracy without any input from community groups or even from their own team.
• Rationalize: "Not our fault. It's always been this way." 
• Throw a couple of principals under the bus with no due process.
• Impose new bureaucratic rules (annual fingerprinting??) that put the onus on teachers and makes them suspect (i.e., meeting one-on-one with their students) and makes it more difficult for them to do their jobs. The Tribune, whose reporters broke the story in the first place, wasted no time in placing equal blame for the scandal on the CTU.
• Do an end run around your own appointed IG.
• Above all, cover the behinds of the mayor, his schools CEO and Board President.

Jadine Chou, CPS’s chief of safety and security, now says all employees are required to report suspected "grooming" behavior on the part of colleagues. At first I thought she meant whether teachers smelled bad or were having a bad-hair day. But, it obviously means something else. Please give us a checklist of such behaviors, Jadine, so we can turn colleagues in and have them fired immediately.

Inspector General Nicholas Schuler, who is supposed to work with the new department, said Wednesday that he was largely in the dark about the new plan.

"Figuring out how we're going to interface with CPS and the new unit they've started today is what I would have liked to have seen some more details about before today," he said.

After an uproar in the press, Schuler was nominally put in charge of the investigation. But he will remain under the watchful eye of CEO Jackson.

Chamala Jordan, parent to a CPS student, said the announcement left her confused.

"As a parent, honestly, those things were told to us that they were in place. So to create or construct a whole new entity, that was supposed to be in place already, doesn't really make sense to me," she said. 

Jesse Sharkey, CTU Veep

"While tutoring a student alone in your room puts you under a cloud of suspicion, I think we have to be concerned about what that would mean for the work that we do as educators."

Sharkey also raised doubts about the new department's origins. The formation of the office was developed with Maggie Hickey, a former federal prosecutor who is overseeing the comprehensive review of CPS policies as state inspector general.

"The bottom line reaction is that I'm surprised by this and I don't trust its political independence," Sharkey said.

RYH calls for Pres. Clark to "step down".

Jennie Biggs, CPS parent and Raise Your Hand (RYH) Communications Director.

President Clark and his predecessors were briefed on rampant reports of sexual abuse in our schools over time and did NOT act to ensure this situation was better managed, and did NOT demand that procedures and policies were implemented beyond very basic and clearly insufficient mandated reporter trainings.

 We do not know how much Frank Clark or David Vitale or those before shared with respective board members, but we do know that they knew and did nothing.

Sure, some individual teachers, principals and staff are also complicit.

BUT YOU hold the keys to district policy making, and YOU did not act, YOU did not do your jobs, YOU did not ensure schools were being trained, and you should step down and admit that you are part of a flawed system of school governance that has no checks and balances.

Chicago Mayoral candidate Lori Lightfoot on Hitting Left

If you look at what's been happening in the Chicago Public School system, especially this past six or seven years, you see epic failure after epic failure. You can't have a good, well-run public school system when you have five CEOs in the last seven years...Yes, I do support an elected school board. -- Hitting Left