Chicago Public Schools students will return to class on Monday, August 26th.
The 2024-2024 school year will mark the district's second year dealing with a bus driver shortage.
This affects general education students who participate in magnet or selective programs.
Some students will receive a CTA Ventra card, while others can be dropped off earlier or picked up later.
“We've made great progress this year compared to the past two years,” said Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez, “We've increased the number of drivers by nearly 25 percent, so we're now picking up and dropping off more students than ever before. The challenge is, we're also getting more requests for pick-ups.”
Martinsed added that some students may want to keep the scholarships provided by the school district, while others will see their scholarships cut as soon as the new school year begins.
CPS CEO Pedro Martinez said progress is being made toward solving the bus driver shortage.
In a new initiative for CPS, school funding will be based on need and equity, not enrollment.
“I remember when I went to the school next door, we didn't have a separate art class,” said Martinez, explaining that she was a CPS student in the 1970s and '80s. “It might have been part of the job I was doing. This year, all schools will have an art and music teacher, not just a physical education teacher, and at least a third elective teacher. Whether that's an art or music class or a foreign language class is up to the school.”
As the school year gets underway, tensions have been building between Martinez and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, with reports suggesting the mayor wants to oust the schools CEO.
“I want to be clear, when it comes to our overall vision, there is a much more aligned view today between the mayor's office, city hall, us and the union. We want our schools to be adequately resourced. We are prioritizing the schools with the highest needs. And, you know, from the budget changes to implementing parental leave. We were the first district in the country to implement parental leave, which allows more staff to continue working in our schools. There is an aligned view. The challenge is that our schools are not adequately resourced. We have a big challenge with funding. Our federal funding is expiring this year. We are working on that. We are in contract negotiations right now.”
His message to parents was: “We are focused on having our best school year ever, because we know this is going to be our strongest school year ever.”
ABC7 Chicago reached out to Mayor Brandon Johnson's office about Pedro Martinez's future with Chicago Public Schools but did not receive a response, but when asked about the matter earlier this month, Johnson said he doesn't publicly discuss personnel matters.
The pandemic has been tough on students across Illinois, and a new study by the University of Illinois System shows just how significantly it has affected achievement levels in English and math.
Dr. Mariana Barragan is a researcher with the Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative at the University of Illinois.
The researchers found that only about a quarter of public school students have returned to pre-pandemic levels of English language achievement.
Even fewer students have returned to pre-pandemic levels in math, said Dr. Mariana Barragan, a researcher at the Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative at the University of Illinois.
They partnered with the Illinois State Board of Education to study how the pandemic has changed students' test performance.
“We've found that Illinois' recovery has been strong but uneven. When we look at the data, we see that elementary and middle school performance has recovered more quickly, with English nearly back to pre-pandemic levels. Math has not. We also see that high school test scores have stagnated, declining consistently since the pandemic began. In fact, only 15% of high school districts have returned to pre-pandemic levels in math,” Barragan said.
She explained that absenteeism could be one of the reasons for the disparity between grades.
“High school students are missing more days of school than they were before the pandemic, in fact more than ever before, so we believe that these high rates of absence may be impacting their learning,” she said.
The study also found that school districts with high concentrations of Black, Latino and low-income students were furthest from pre-pandemic performance levels and were also the most likely to rely on distance learning.
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