Defend Chicago’s Social Justice High School (Sojo)
Sojo was “born out of struggle” in 2001 when 14 Little Village residents endured a 19- day hunger strike to fight for a new school in their neighborhood. In Fall 2005, Sojo and three other small schools opened in a new building on 31st and Kostner, serving Little Village and North Lawndale. Sojo is a neighborhood school built on the principles of the Hunger Strike: “truth and transparency, struggle and sacrifice, ownership and agency, and collective and community power”. It is a national model of social justice education. But now, Sojo is under attack by the CPS Administration. CPS is trying to dismantle Sojo by downgrading the curriculum, displacing teachers, and lying to the community. Sojo’s very existence as a neighborhood public school serving low-income African American and Latin@ students with the vision of community self-determination is a threat to CPS’s top-down corporate model of schooling.
CPS never gave a contract to the new Sojo principal, Kathy Farr, who was selected by the Advisory LSC and