Parents sit-in to save school’s ‘casita’
To save an old school building known as the “casita,” Chicago parents are sitting in around the clock at Whittier Dual Language School, reports the Wall Street Journal. The $356,000 budgeted to tear down the 2,000-square-foot building should be used to fix it up and turn it into a library, parents say. They’re already collecting books.
School-district officials say the building, in a poor Latino neighborhood southwest of the Loop, is unsafe and would be too expensive to bring up to current building codes. “It’s not even a building. It’s a structure,” said Monique Bond, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Public Schools. “It would need to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up.”
Education as economics (and politics)
On Community College Spotlight: With the Community College Summit set for Tuesday, President Obama is