Concert-goers will enjoy full sets of musical performances by the Chicago Blues Reunion – Barry Goldberg, Nick Gravenites, Harvey Mandel, and Corky Siegel. They’ll be joined by special guests who include Charlie Musselwhite, Eric Burdon, Sam Lay and Elvin Bishop, plus surprise guests.

Tickets purchased through THIS LINK will benefit the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. CCH receives 30% of the ticket price.

Thursday, June 6
Vic Theatre, 3145 N. Sheffield
Doors open at 6 p.m., show starts at 7 p.m.

Ticket levels:
·        Gold Circle – $105 – Access to premium seating on the main floor, after show meet & greet reception with the Chicago Blues Reunion and a commemorative t-shirt.  Only 200 tickets available.
·        Balcony Seating – $65 – Access to balcony seating and commemorative t-shirt.
·        General Admission – $35 – Standing-room-only on the main floor.

The event will also feature a silent auction of blues photographs and memorabilia to also benefit CCH.

Born In Chicago is a soulful documentary that tells the story of middle-class white kids who learned to play and live the blues directly from its most legendary practitioners. Icons like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf passed the musical torch to a coterie of unlikely next generation admirers, including Paul Butterfield and Michael Bloomfield. They helped spread the music most closely identified with Chicago around the world and back again. The journey of these 1960s acolytes, including CBR’s Goldberg, Gravenites, Mandel and Siegel, truly launched thousands of bands over the years and kept the blues a vital musical force throughout the world.  Born in Chicago will be screened June 7-9 at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

About Chicago Blues Reunion:

Barry Goldberg is the keyboard Svengali who, over a career that spans five decades, has backed Bob Dylan, Mitch Ryder, Jimi Hendrix, and the Ramones, and is co-founder of the Electric Flag (with Gravenites, Michael Bloomfield and Buddy Miles).

Nick Gravenites a/k/a “Nick The Greek” is the composer of the song “Born In Chicago,” originally recorded by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which lends its title to the film. Moving from Chicago to the San Francisco Bay Area, he worked with Quicksilver Messenger Service, Janis Joplin, and the Electric Flag.

Harvey “The Snake” Mandel is the Chicago-born guitarist who been an integral part of recordings by Canned Heat and the Rolling Stones.  His solo albums, including Baby Batter and Cristo Redentor, established him as a guitar innovator of the first order.

Corky Siegel, co-founder of Siegel-Schwall Band and leader of the groundbreaking Chamber Blues ensemble, is a musical renaissance man.  Siegel-Schwall brought the Chicago blues to a national audience before Siegel broadened his approach and started working in the symphonic realm with such masters as Seiji Ozawa, Arthur Fiedler as well as Dr. L. Subramaniam, India’s greatest Eastern classical violin virtuoso.

About the special guests:
·       Charlie Musselwhite – inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2010, and nominated for 6 Grammy Awards, reportedly inspired Dan Aykroyd’s character in the Blue Brothers film.
·        Elvin Bishop – wrote “Traveling Shoes” and “Messed Around and Fell in Love” and played guitar with Bo Diddly, BB King and John Lee Hooker, among other blues legends
·        Eric Burdon – vocalist for The Animals, frequent collaborator with WAR.
·        Sam Lay – drummer on Bob Dylan’s historic first electric tour, has recorded and performed with top blues legends.

- Michael Nameche, Director of Development

More than 100 lawyers signed a letter urging Chicago Public Schools to halt the proposed closings of 54 schools.

Of the 47,500 elementary students who attend the 54 schools, 3,900 are homeless and 2,400 require special education services, the letter states.

“We hope the letter will be one more element that will make the board think again before they close all these schools,” said Paul L. Strauss, co-director of litigation at the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Inc.

“Realistically, this is just one piece of protest.”

The 128 attorneys, including Strauss, who signed the five-page letter sent it Monday to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett and David Vitale, president of the Chicago Board of Education.

Read the full text of the letter.

Strauss said he hopes officials will postpone the closures and try to find an alternative solution. The Chicago Board of Education will vote on the closures Wednesday.

Laurene M. Heybach, director at the Law Project of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, also signed the letter.

The 8 percent homeless rate at the 54 schools is 4 percentage points higher than the district average, she said. The closures will especially hurt those students who, Heybach said, lack continuity and stability in their lives.

“A rule of thumb amongst educators is that every time a student changes schools, he or she can lose between four to six months of academic time,” she said. “When you have a population that is already struggling academically and then you impose a forced school change, that is another setback.”

Stacey E. Platt, an associate director and clinical professor at the Civitas ChildLaw Center at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, signed the letter because her husband teaches and her children attend schools in the district.

While her children do not go to one of the schools proposed for closure, she said she worries about students’ safety when they have to travel longer distances.

“It makes it a lot harder to build a strong community when children are being taken from one place to another,” Platt said. “This is really an unprecedented move before it has been looked at carefully. The communities and families of Chicago do not want it, and they’re not being heard.”

A spokesman for the mayor’s office could not be reached for comment.

The Cook County Bar Association (CCBA) opposes the closure of one of the schools — John Calhoun North Elementary School on the West Side.

Stephen Stern, the owner of the Law Office of Stephen Stern and past president of the bar group, said about a decade ago, the school was selected as CCBA’s “Adopt a School.”

Stern said the school district selected the school for closure based on its underutilization and poor academic performance. But the bar group disagrees, based in part on a review this month conducted by an independent hearing officer.

“This school shouldn’t have even been on the list,” he said.

Stern said the school should qualify for a ranking that deems it a high-performing school based on state tests.

“We think it should be considered a Level 1 school, and the only reason it is not a Level 1 is because of a student who came late in the year, had no preparation and tested poorly.”

Larry R. Rogers Jr. — a partner at Power, Rogers & Smith P.C. and past president of CCBA — said the bar group has sent volunteers to read to students, participate in graduation activities and career-day events.

“The teachers and the community — by way of the Cook County Bar Association at least, if not others — have demonstrated a commitment to the success of the students,” he said.

“When you select and participate in an independent hearing officer process, and they deem this to be a school that should not be closed, to have that disregarded seems to ignore the community’s interests. … It makes the whole process seem to be a farce.”

Becky Carroll, CPS chief communications officer, said in an e-mail that relocating students from Calhoun North to Willa Cather Elementary School will provide them with higher quality education.

“Too many of our children have been cheated out of the resources they need to succeed,” she said. “And we owe it to them to change that.”

“Together we reflect many decades of experience working with lower income children, youth and families in communities of color,” the group of lawyers writes.

The attorneys urge Mayor Emanuel, the Board of Education, and Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett to reconsider going forward with the largest mass closure of public schools in the U.S. As proposed by CPS, more than 45,000 students would be impacted, including more than 3,900 homeless children and teens.

The attorneys’ five-page letter notes that the closures, mergers and school turnarounds proposed by CPS overwhelmingly impact “dramatically impoverished” African-American neighborhoods on the South Side and West Side – a disparity that is “provoking racial and economic divisiveness.”

The CCH Law Project helped mobilize support for the open letter. CCH attorneys Laurene Heybach, Patricia Nix-Hodes and Elizabeth Cunningham are among the 128 to sign on. Chicago Daily Law Bulletin interviewed several of the signers, including Ms. Heybach.

Homeless students are more than twice as likely than others to be impacted by Mayor Emanuel’s school closings, according to an analysis by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.

And if plans for transitioning homeless students are any indication, CPS preparations for school closings are far behind where they’ve been at this point in previous years — and far behind where they need to be.

The 3,900 homeless students who would be impacted if the school board approves all proposed mergers, turnarounds and co-locations represent 8.5 percent of impacted students — more than twice the share of homeless students citywide, which CPS reports as 4 percent, according to CCH.

The 1,400 homeless  students displaced from closing schools represents an even higher proportion — 8.7 percent of students subject to displacement.

CCH’s Law Project has assisted homeless students impacted by school closures since 2004, and “CPS has never demonstrated its ability to successfully serve students transitioning to new schools,” said Patricia Nix-Hodes, the coalition’s associate legal director. “We have seen students lost in the process as well as students at risk of increased violence.

“Even on a much smaller scale, receiving schools have not been adequately prepared,” Nix-Hodes said.  “Students have arrived to new schools without enough desks, books or staff. School records have failed to arrive in a timely manner. Adequate transportation has not been provided to get students to the new school.

“It is inconceivable that CPS will be able to provide all impacted with better school choices and meaningful transition and transportation services, especially with the final announcements taking place so late in the school year.”

Learning from the past?

But although current CPS leaders claim they’ve learned from the failures of past school closings, preparations this year are far behind previous years, said Laurene Heybach, director of the coalition’s law project.

The CCH Law Project represents homeless students under a 2000 court order establishing CPS’s responsiblity to provide them with access to schools.  In 2004 CCH went to court to force CPS to apply the protections in school closings.

Since then CPS has provided CCH with a list of homeless students that would be affected by closings at the time school actions were proposed, generally by January (and by December under the new state facilities law, a deadline Emanuel leaned on the General Assembly to extend this year).

The coalition would do outreach with families, apprise them of their rights to transitional services and transportation, and provide counseling to help them choose the right school for their children, which could be different than the designated receiving school for homeless families.

“It’s a massive amount of information if parents are going to be given a choice,” Heybach said.  “It’s important to have someone help them sort through their options.”

No information

This year CCH has yet to get such a list, Heybach said.  “This year we’re being told we won’t get a list until after the school board votes,” she said.  “We feel like they’re cutting off a community resource.”

They’re also telescoping a process in which families had several months to discuss options and visit schools into a single week.  Families with students in schools approved for closure by the board next Wednesday will have from May 23 to May 31 to select a receiving school.  (Schools will be closed on May 27 for Memorial Day.)

And last week CPS chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett sent a letter to principals saying any school “that has space” will have to accept any student from a closing school who requests admission next week, Raise Your Hand reports.

 Chaos

“There’s still no list of which schools have room,” said Heybach.  “It’s utter chaos.  Everything’s in flux.  They’re making it up as they go.”

Also long before this point in previous years, CPS had provided parents of homeless children with a detailed letter of summer programs to help them transition to new schools.  “All the parent wanted something for the summer,” said Heybach.

This year that information is not available.

“If the [new] school is better, shouldn’t they have some academic support to prepare for it, shouldn’t they have some social support to prepare for the transition?” asked Heybach.  “Why isn’t anyone addressing academic and social supports?

“For any person who cares about improving educational outcomes, this makes no sense,” she said.  “It’s just not what any educational professional, any teacher or social worker, would ever support as a way to organize the most massive school closing in U.S. history.”

Not recommended

That may be why the Broad Foundation recommends an 18-month process for closing schools, with six months of community engagement preceding the announcement of a list of school closures.

Under their recommended schedule, an initial list of closings would have released in October and finalized in December.

Student reassignment, including multiple meetings were families can learn about the reassignment process, would take place over four months, from December to March.  Four months would be allowed for schools to revise their enrollment projections and budgets.

It may also be why Byrd-Bennett’s commission on school closings recommended taking two years for the closings.

As an anonymous commission member told the Sun Times in March, “They don’t have the expertise to accomplish that [closing 50 schools] in such a short timeframe.  When they closed down as many as 12 schools, it was a disaster.”

Kaleyah Wesley, herself a 14-year-old living in transitional housing, sums up the challenges faced by the CCH Education Committee during its outreach in select Chicago Public Schools (CPS).

The Education Committee met again this week to assess outreach efforts to date and plot the course forward. Homeless and recently homeless teens and parents, educators, and volunteers belong to the group, which works with organizers J.D. Klippenstein and Hannah Willage.

Small group discussion (L-R): Nakeiah Jones, Amaro Julian, Serena Williams, Charles Austin, Destiny Williams

At Monday’s meeting, they shared the successes and challenges of recent outreach at six schools, three of which – Attucks, Overton and Emmet – are among 53 elementary school slated for closure by CPS.

It was sophomore Tamia Ready’s first committee meeting after helping with outreach at her high school, Al Raby, for several weeks

“I have a couple of (homeless) friends,” Tamia said, “and know the things they have to go through with the school to get what they need. I chose to join the program because there’s certain things people need help with. If I can help, I should contribute.”

Week in and week out, committee members have shown up before and after school, talking with students and parents about the options and services available to homeless students, including free bus cards, uniforms, and tutoring, as well as the right to remain in their original school or the school nearest their shelter or transitional home. Committee members say that parents and students are often unaware of their options.

The committee’s weekly presence at six schools has forged new relationships with students, parents, and teachers, allowing the committee’s involvement to grow at the schools. For example, outreach at Overton Elementary led to an invitation for the CCH committee to speak to the South Side school’s Local School Council.

The Education Committee decided to extend outreach to several more Chicago schools and to stand in solidarity with schools slated for closure. This included participating in a May 14 march to protest the proposed closure of Overton, 221 E. 49th St.

With a Chicago Board of Education vote over school closures looming on May 22, the school year winding down, and a full schedule of schools to conduct outreach, the Education Committee has a busy month ahead.

- Jim Lacy, Media Volunteer

Senior Community Organizer Dollie Brewer escorted eight community leaders to Springfield Wednesday to talk to legislators about maintaining support for key human services, including homeless youth and shelter programs.

Working with Mrs. Brewer (front, left) and Policy Specialist Jennifer Cushman, leaders met with 10 legislators serving on the Human Services Appropriations Committees in the State House and Senate.

Our leaders live at Deborah’s Place, Breakthrough Urban Ministries, and You Can Make It shelter, all in Chicago.

One couple on the trip also talked about being homeless for three years. Their names are on four housing waitlists, and when they are not in shelters, the couple stays with friends, relatives or even on the train.

Leaders met with State Sen. Donne Trotter, Sen. Patricia Van Pelt, Sen. Heather Steans and Sen. Mattie Hunter.

They also met with State Reps. Rep. La Shawn Ford, Rep. Robyn Gabel, Rep. Esther Golar, Rep. David Harris, Rep. Camille Lilly, and Rep. Elgie Sims (pictured below).

To thank supporters for donations of $100 or more during its spring appeal, CCH will send an author-signed copy of Blue Balliett’s new children’s book, Hold Fast.

“Chicago-based author Blue Balliett’s new book, Hold Fast is a literary mystery set amid the harsh realities of the homeless,” a Chicago Tribune reviewer wrote. “Joining the ranks of Calder and Petra, the resourceful preteen heroes of Balliett’s previous novels, “Chasing Vermeer,” “The Wright 3″ and “The Calder Game,” and Zoomy in “The Danger Box” is 11-year-old Early Pearl, a whip-smart book-loving girl whose world is upended when her father, Dashel, who works at the Harold Washington Library, goes missing.

Hold Fast is a popular book among CCH staff and leaders, and our children. Jane, an 11-year-old from Oak Park, told us that Hold Fast is her “favorite book ever,” and she has gone on to read two more of Ms. Balliett’s books in recent weeks.

Click here to make a tax-deductible donation and obtain a copy of Hold Fast.

“By the end of the 2012 school year, an estimated thirty thousand children in the city of Chicago were without a home,” Ms. Balliett wrote in her prologue. “This number does not include those living in the surrounding suburbs, and is thought to be low. What does thirty thousand look like? Count out thirty pennies and pretend that each one has a name. Now make one thousand groups of thirty pennies. These are our children.”

Ms. Balliett’s first book, “Chasing Vermeer,” was a New York Times bestseller and an Edgar Award winner that won the Chicago Tribune Prize for Young Adult Fiction. A Hyde Park resident and former elementary teacher, Ms. Balliett acknowledged a variety of organizations that helped her during the writing of Hold Fast, including CCH and Development Director Michael Nameche, Chicago HOPES, StreetWise, and Catholic Charities.

(274 pp. Scholastic Press. $17.99 hardcover. For ages 8 to 12)

- Anne Bowhay, Media

Photos taken for CCH by Brian Sokolowski

By Curtis Black

Two actions protested the closing of Overton Elementary in Bronzeville today — a morning rally highlighting safety issues (and much more), and an afternoon action, which raised larger issues of resources by drawing the connection to a Walmart being built nearby with TIF funds.

About a hundred parents marched from Overton, at 49th and Indiana, to Mollison, at 44th and King  — past four gangs and four drug locations, according to Francis Newman, a parent from Williams Prep, which is also on the school closing list.

The walk also took them past the spot where Columbia College student Kevin Ambrose was shot and killed last week, she noted.

“We’re demanding these schools be kept open and that they get the resources they need,” Newman said.  She said she recently visited Disney Magnet school, which has numerous computers, smart boards, and iPads for children.  “In our school, we can’t get a computer that works,” she said.

The real status-quo

Photos taken for CCH by Brian Sokolowski

The idea that “schools are under-resourced because they’re underutilized is a lie that is used to validate the status quo,” said Jeanette Taylor, an LSC member at Mollison and a leader with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization.  “The status quo in Chicago is closing schools.”

Several parents discussed schools that had struggled after repeatedly receiving students from closing schools and are still being subject to school actions.

A hearing officer has recommended keeping Overton open, challenging CPS’s assertion that Mollison is a higher-performing school, which is based on its highly technical system of performance points.

“Closing this school to bring children from Overton to Mollison doesn’t sound like education reform it me, is sounds like sabotage,” Taylor said.

Overton parent Darlene Johnson said she served as a Safe Passage worker at Dyett High School last year.  “A boy walked past us, turned the corner, and was shot,” she said.

She also raised the issue of budget priorities:  “We say no money to McCormick Place for a DePaul arena, no TIF money for Wal-Mart — and why does that rich lady that used to be on the school board need all that TIF money?”  She was referring to Penny Pritzker.

Wal-Mart connections

That was also the theme of an afternoon rally that started at the school and ended at the site of a new Wal-Mart at 47th and King Drive, featuring Wal-Mart workers from OUR Wal-Mart and Warehouse Workers for Justice, along with theChicago Teachers Union and Chicago Jobs With Justice.

The Walmart development on 47th is being subsidized with $13 million in TIF money, on top of an $11 million TIF subsidy for a new Walmart in Pullman, organizers said.  On top of that, the Walton family foundation gave close to a half-million dollars to finance CPS’s school closing “community engagement”  (including advertising).

Walmart’s owners have also given $22 million to charters in Chicago — their largest investment in charters in the nation — organizers said.

The world’s largest employer — and the nation’s wealthiest family — “can afford to build their own store without our tax dollars,” said Susan Hurley of JWJ.  “That money should be going to our schools.  We could save a lot of schools with $24 million.

“And they need to do a lot better by their workers before they start telling us how to run our schools.”

“Why does Walmart and the Walton Family, who don’t live in Chicago, have more say about our schools than the people who send their children there?” asked Kristine Mayle of CTU.  “It’s because they have the same agenda as the mayor, which is … to privatize them.”

Sponsoring State Rep. Chris Welch (D-Hillside) says, “Basic rights such as the right to maintain gainful employment, to access public services and spaces, to access emergency medical care, and the right to vote on the same basis as others cannot be denied solely because someone is homeless or lists a shelter as their address.”

The only opposition during the House debate (May 10) concerned the right to vote and whether there would be enough precautions to forestall voter fraud perpetuated by homeless people.

“We’ll have to trust the local authorities,” Welch said. State Rep. David Reis (R-Sainte Marie) got a laugh out of that response.

S.B. 1210 has passed the House, 76-33.

And grassroots efforts to improve communities across the country all have a common thread – residents speak up, discuss issues, seek solutions and look for accountability. That is how change can bloom. 

As families celebrate Mother’s Day on Sunday, Equal Voice News presents 32 profiles of “Community Trailblazers.” (They include Marilyn Escoe, an Education Committee leader nominated by CCH.)

They are women – mothers, grandmothers and neighbors – who are making things better. They know solutions are possible.

The stories run the gamut and cover homelessness, immigration reform, education, access to fresh produce and just making sure kids are safe.

Read about MaryBeth Stover from Marietta, Pa. and what having an automobile means to her and her children. Learn about Lupe Gonzalo of Immokalee, Fla. and see how she uses her voice to talk about labor conditions for farmworkers. In Oakland, Calif., Princess Beverly Williams works on housing issues – but she also has learned about the “capacity for love.”

There is much to be thankful on this Mother’s Day. But there is much that still needs to be changed.

For mothers, economic inequity remains. A mother is 37 percent less likely to be hired than a woman with no children. A single mother earns, on average each year, less than $26,000.

A woman is the primary adult in 84 percent of homeless families. And domestic violence is the leading cause for homelessness for mothers and children.

There is still a demand for positive change. To see how neighborhood progress is being made and how challenges can give strength, read these profiles of “Community Trailblazers.”