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A Point of Strength
Robert Upton, junior. ELLIE MEJIA But when them red lights came on in the recording studio, it was like a bell ringing in a boxing match and I did it.” Eleventh grader Robert Upton’s eyes grow as if...
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Learn Hard, Play Hard
MIKE BLOCK AND TONY THORNTON I’m in a Hyde Park Starbucks, hunched over the laptop of game developer Rob Lockhart, trying hard to read the world as computer code. On the screen is a bird’s-eye map of...
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Poetry in the Gray City
JACK NUELLE If you hear me, say, ‘Hey oh!’ ” Dominique Chestand shouts, singsong, from the lip of the stage at the Metro in Wrigleyville. The audience, still filing in, delivers the requested exchange....
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A Citywide Sanctuary
ISABEL OCHOA GOLD Today is a carefree kind of day,” Kimmerly Hayes said, sitting in her office at Way of Truth Baptist Church in Marquette Park. It was Tuesday morning, the second day of spring break,...
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Learning, Unedited
MAHA AHMED At Pilsen’s Chicago Art Department, Nat Soti and Edyta Stepien ran around frantically, doing last-minute installations of pieces for their exhibition, “connect [ ] ED,” and putting up tape...
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One Year On
LUKE WHITE Another spring day begins at Bronzeville’s Mollison Elementary School. Two blocks away, a seventh grader yanks at the arm of his little sister. She’s insisting on picking a palmful of yellow...
View ArticleLocal School Councils by the Numbers
On April 7 and 8—report card pick-up days—public schools in Chicago held their biannual elections for local school councils, or LSCs. These councils hold real power: they approve the school’s budget,...
View ArticleNot Your Average Summer School
With summer fast approaching, we’re all thinking about how we will while away the scorching days ahead. The South Side Weekly turned to Chicago City of Learning for opportunities available to kids this...
View ArticleA Student Voice for CPS
Raynard Gillespie is a nineteen-year-old junior at Camelot Excel Academy of Englewood. He’s frustrated with the public perception of CPS, as well as of his neighborhood. “It’s a lot of kids that go to...
View ArticleA Fresh Milieu
The last thing these kids need is perpendicular walls. So our walls have a lot of curves, there’s a real effort on not being rigid,” said Timothy Shannon, chief development officer at the University of...
View ArticleRally for Karen Lewis
Until Monday night, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis was the most likely challenger to unseat Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the 2015 mayoral race. Though the outspoken leader of 30,000 district...
View ArticleWriting an Englewood Journal
Corey Hall teaches English composition at Kennedy-King College, and is the editor of Expressions from Englewood, an anthology of personal writing. Expressions, which collects poetry and prose from...
View ArticleSpotlight on Afterschool
On October 23, the Empire State Building lit up the New York skyline as afterschool programs across the nation opened their doors for rallies, talent shows, open houses, and more. The Afterschool...
View ArticleRegrading “The Worst in the Nation”
Twenty-seven years ago this past Saturday, major newspapers across the country quoted then-Secretary of Education William Bennett as calling the Chicago schools the worst in the nation. Two months...
View ArticleOpting Out
Two years ago, Joy Clendenning, a Hyde Park mother of three CPS students, was walking her kids home after school when one of them broke down in tears. “Mom,” the sixth grader said, “I don’t want to...
View ArticlePlans to Expand
If we want to continue making progress, we have to start in the earliest years of a child’s life,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel pronounced emphatically before a packed chamber on October 15, as part of the...
View ArticlePlaying to Win
Near the corner of 93rd Street and Lafayette Avenue, nestled between St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church and a row of houses, sits an unremarkable tan brick building. Indistinguishable from...
View ArticleChiArts Migrates North
A prestigious arts high school where students endure four years of intensive training and teenage angst—where the trials of adolescence may just be punctuated with song and dance numbers—may seem a...
View ArticleThe Union Candidate for the Post-Industrial Ward
On February 24, Susan Garza hopes to replace John Pope as the Alderman of the 10th Ward on the Far Southeast Side of Chicago. The vocal and animated fifty-four-year-old calls to mind a progressive from...
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