Chicago Teacher: Inhumane Working Conditions are Inhumane Learning Conditions
Guest post by Sarah Chambers.
At my large elementary school on Chicago's southwest side, the mercury on the thermometer soars to a scorching 90 degrees. Sweat drips down the students' little round faces, their hair plastered to their foreheads. It's only 9am, not even at the peak of the day's heat. Already, a student has become ill. Another student tries to cover his nose with a wad of blood-soaked Kleenex as it drips onto his shirt and down to the floor. The boy runs to the bathroom holding his nose with bloodstains on his palms. He stands over the sink with blood gushing out for over 10 minutes, covering the sink a crimson red. His nose does not stop bleeding. Never have I ever seen such a horrendous nose bleed.
As the Chicago Public Schools opened for the year, scenes like this one were not unusual as hundreds of schools have regularly used classrooms without air conditioning. The exact numbers are unknown as when we asked them, CPS themselves didn't know. Unable or unwilling to maintain a solid count or communicate with the power company, we are left to alleviate the suffering of our students. It is important to understand that this is not only incompetence, but also a genuine plan to sabotage and destroy traditional schools and open charter schools. Just this year, the Board took out a multi-decade loan and spent millions to close 50 schools because they said there were too many schools and we had a deficit. Many of the schools were high performing and parents and students fought hard to save the schools they loved and had chosen. CPS ignored their choices and destroyed those schools. The next month, plans were released to approve the opening of a dozen new charter schools at an even greater cost.
I hand the student a roll of paper towels and walk him down to the office to call his mom for an early dismissal. I ask him, "Have you had bloody noses like this in the past?" He tells me that