Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Some Noble charter school students are “turning to suicide as a way out” Parents United for Responsible Education

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Some Noble charter school students are “turning to suicide as a way out”

Katie Osgood at the BOE meeting. Substance photo by George Schmidt
Katie Osgood at the BOE meeting. Substance photo by George Schmidt
At the January Board of Education meeting, teacher Katie Osgood called out the Noble charter school network for its extreme discipline practices. Katie is a teacher at a psychiatric hospital in Chicago. Here’s part of what she shared with the BOE, as published in Substance newspaper:

I am here today as a concerned citizen and an educator. In my hospital, we are seeing a disturbing pattern among patients coming from the Noble St Charter School Network of schools. We’ve seen an alarming number of students being admitted to the hospital with depression, severe anxiety, and increasingly with actual suicide attempts all directly tied to these schools’ discipline, academic, and retention policies.

Over and over, we are hearing the same stories from students-stories of constant stress from overly strict discipline, exhaustion from unreasonable workloads, and the very real fear of repeating a school year regardless of academic progress or IEP status. These students report cultures of shaming and humiliation. They speak of feeling beaten down from constant punishment over the most minor infractions such as not
- See more at: http://pureparents.org/?p=21112#sthash.pnQfwJg2.dpuf



Pellet or pain: Oppression the “Noble” way
The following post is a companion to the story above about Katie Osgood’s January 2014 testimony to the Chicago Board of Education, in which she stated that “far too many (Noble charter school students) are ending up in a psych ward.” In February 2012, PURE, along with the Advancement Project and VOYCE, first publicly exposed the “secret sauce” of the discipline policies of the Noble Network of Ch