WGN: Principal Troy LaRaviere on teacher pensions.
CHICAGO – The teachers’ pension crisis clouds every aspect of the Chicago Public Schools.
The district is running enormous deficits and demanding that teachers pay more.
But teachers say they didn’t cause the problem and it’s unfair to put the burden of on them.
Tonight, one Chicago principal is speaking out on what he says is the real problem with the pension crisis.
Troy Laraviere will challenge your pre-conceived notions just as quickly as he’ll challenge powerful interests, as he showed when he burst on the scene.
He is both an administrator and an agitator, so much so he was slapped with a warning by the Board of Education.
But Laraviere doesn’t seem worried about losing his job to speak his mind.
“I worry far more about the ability of the young people coming to CPS about the knowledge and skill set that they need to get any job than I worry about me keeping one job,” he said.
His road to this job really starts with his mother — a white woman who had a baby with and a black man, in the days when that was taboo.
“She was told that, by her mother that she couldn’t bring that child into her home. So she left. She was told to give it up for adoption or leave, so she left,” he recalled.
The family bounced between Bronzeville and Back of the Yards, thinking he would never amount to much anyway, he went straight from high school to the U.S. Navy at the age of 17.
“What is it about how I grew up, what is it about my life’s experiences that led me to having such a low assessment of myself?” he asks.
He enrolled at the University of Illinois without much of a plan. But once he saw his first report card – straight A’s – he had a revelation.
“I wanted to become a teacher, so that no kid like me would come through my classroom, and not have a sense of what his or her potential,” he said.
He became the principal at Blaine Elementary, and under his leadership the WGN: Principal Troy LaRaviere on teacher pensions. | Fred Klonsky:
