Worst Food Desert In Chicago Strikes Back

The Residents of Altgeld Gardens Have Launched Occupy Altgeld Gardens in Support of Occupy the Hood/Wall Street

Worst Food Desert In Chicago Strikes Back  $5.00 a gallon milk and $30.00 hams too much for public housing community   Update on OCCUPY ALTGELD - Day 4 "We have turned around about 300 cars from shopping with Rosebud Farm and we have stopped about 50 walk-ins from shopping at Rosebud Farm." From Altgeld Gardens in Chicago, Illinois - This is a protest of the Rosebud Farm near the Altgeld Gardens Public Housing Community at about 500 East 130th Street in Chicago, Illinois.  The current merchants in Rosebud Farm take advantage of a community described as the worst food desert in Chicago. The current Rosebud Farm store also services the residents of Golden Gate, Concordia Park, Riverdale, Dolton and Roseland. The current Rosebud Farm merchants lease the building from the Corporate Rosebud Farm who are housed in Indiana. Rosebud Farm products are sold in major food stores such as Jewels, Dominicks, the now closed Moo & Oink, Pete's, Ultra etc. Cheryl Johnson, standing with her mother who passed away this year, Hazel Johnson (sitting right), the "Mother of the Environmental Justice Movement" Cheryl Johnson, President of People for Community Recovery (PCR) is leading the protest, because neither the Corporate Rosebud Farm President or the current Rosebud Farm merchant will meet with Cheryl Johnson to discuss the issues of concern for the residents of Altgeld Gardens.  The Occupy Altgeld Gardens major strategy is to peaceably turn around shoppers from shopping at the store.  This includes providing transportation to people who walked up and had no transportation to go elsewhere. A woman who disregarded the protest and shopped at Rosebud Farm was upset after she saw what she paid to shop at the store and she showed the protesters the receipt for the groceries, which included 1 roll of toilet paper for $1.53, 1 gallon vitamin D milk 4.99, 1 jar salad dressing 7.99, a ham butt $30, 1 small pot roast $15, etc.   What is even more outrageous is that this merchant refuses to accept WIC certificates, which stands for Women, Infants and Children (a government program to ensure proper nutrition for poor mothers and children). How can a merchant refuse to accept this voucher which is paid for by the government? Why? Because the government is not going to refund the prices they charge for food. Again, this is outrageous and unacceptable, because it forces recipients with the voucher to have transportation to go elsewhere. Altgeld Gardens Public Housing Community The nearest major grocery store is Food for Less, 142nd Sibley or Ultra or Aldi's at 127th Ashland both about 3 to 4 miles away.  Any stores in-between are probably price gouging as well. Late Friday evening, the police came and told protesters that Rosebud Farm reported the protesters were threatening their customers. Occupy Altgeld protestors were asked to disband because they had no permit to protest on public property. The protesters moved to the property across from Rosebud and continued until 8 pm. They did not want to risk being arrested without a plan. Cheryl Johnson is adamant that the protest will continue until the owners sit down at the table to discuss the issues at hand. At various times, there were about 13 protesters present but more protesters are needed. Occupy Altgeld needs help. Occupy Altgeld needs legal advice. Occupy Altgeld needs financial support. Occupy Altgeld needs an action plan to solidify their list of demands with acceptable solutions, and most of all, they need support from all communities in and around Chicago.  They plan to march through the holidays. You can help too. Talk to anyone you know who lives in the above areas, participate in the protest, contact Cheryl at PCR, 773.840.4618 (office) to find out how you can help.  You don't have to walk all day, but numbers show power and eventually, someone will sit down and talk to them.

November 4, 2011

Mayor Emanuel, Budget Committee Chairman Carrie Austin and Vice Chairman Brendan Reilly Announce Amendments to 2012 Budget Proposal

Mayor's Press Office    312.744.3334

• Download this Press Release

Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced today that he has reached an agreement with City Council members on several items in the proposed 2012 budget and will submit formal amendments to his budget plan on Monday.
“We have held to our principles, followed through on the tough choices and that’s a win for Chicagoans and their future,” said Mayor Emanuel.
Mayor Emanuel was joined at the announcement by Ald. Carrie Austin (34th), Chairman of the Committee on Budget and Government Operations, Vice-Chairman Brendan Reilly (42nd) and Budget Director Alex Holt.
“This process is about working together to reach a balanced budget plan that will provide the people of Chicago with quality services, while keeping those services affordable to taxpayers,” said Alderman Austin. “These amendments will help accomplish that goal.”
The amendments to the mayor’s budget plan will include the following:

Libraries

• Restoring $3.3 million to the library budget to allow for a full six-day-a-week schedule when school is out, during the summer months and over holiday breaks, providing children with more library access when they are away from school.
• The reduced schedule on Monday and Friday mornings will resume during the school year with agreement from the unions.   The move will restore more than 100 of the planned library layoffs.

City Vehicle Sticker

• Maintaining the weight threshold for heavier passenger vehicles at 4,500 lbs.
• Increasing the tier for lighter vehicles by $10 (from $75 to $85) and the heavier tier by $15 (from $120 to $135). 
• The planned increases for truck stickers will remain as proposed. Stickers for motorcycles will remain at their current rates. Discounted sticker fees for seniors will also remain at current rates. Several groups, including veterans, the disabled, and government entities will continue to receive sticker fee waivers.
• The amendments to sticker fees will be revenue-neutral to the original proposal.
• Increasing fines (from $120 to $200) for sticker scofflaws and late fees (from $40 to $60). 

Fee waivers

• Extending a discount on fees for water services to all non-profit organizations with less than $250 million in assets.
• The three-year phased-in discount will be 60% in 2012, 40% in 2013 and 20% in 2014 and beyond.
• The amendments will result in approximately $12 million in lost revenue for the water and sewer funds over the next three years, which will be absorbed by the fee increases scheduled to begin next year. 

Streets and Sanitation

• Restoring $1 million worth of lot cleaning, weed cutting and graffiti removal services.

The changes in the budget proposal will be cost neutral in that the additional $4.3 million in corporate fund expenses will be offset by the additional revenue from increasing the fines and enforcement for vehicle sticker scofflaws.
Mayor Emanuel announced his budget plan last month that included $417 million worth of expense reductions to help close a $635 million gap between expected revenues and expenses next year.

#  #  #

Citing safety, most high schools keeping police

This summer, CPS officials announced a cost-cutting move that they hoped would save $13 million: Offer high schools $25,000 in exchange for each police officer they agreed to give up. Having officers assigned to schools for 8-hour shifts cost about $75,000 a year per officer, according to CPS. But, even though CPS eventually upped their offer, most high school principals’ concerns over safety have led them to hold on to the two uniformed police officers that have traditionally been assigned to their schools. Chicago Public School Chief Administrative Officer Tim Cawley says that only four high school principals let go of both their officers and 12 gave up one. CPS officials declined to identify those principals that took CPS up on the cash offer, but emphasized the schools have safety plans in place to avoid any problems the loss of the police might bring. Cawley says CPS was able to bring down the costs of having the police officers in schools by telling CPD that the district won’t pay to have them on hand over breaks or the summer. Altogether he says CPS will save about $11 million by being diligent about the way they manage the police officers. Cawley acknowledged that he was surprised that, even principals in schools in good neighborhoods, were reluctant to give up their officers.  When Cawley announced the offer CPS was making to principals, he said he saw it as a “win, win, win.” Principals get some extra cash to spend in perhaps a more productive way, while the district saves some money. “[Police Supt. Garry] McCarthy gets some big numbers of police officers that he can send to the street,” Cawley said. Back in August, he said he thought 70 percent of principals would take CPS up on the offer and he would have no problem with picking up the tab for police officers at schools where principals think they need them. “As you can imagine, in a school where the  officers are very visible and have relationships with students and staff and are clearly helping to keep the peace, those principals will say, ‘I am keeping my cops,’ ” he said at an August budget briefing. “And we say, ‘God bless you, we are fine with that.’  And we are paying for it.” Yet after the experience of having so many principals turn down the offer, Cawley says in the future things might change. Principals might have to reach into their individual school budgets to pay, at least partly, for the police officers, Cawley says. “Then we will see how much they value them,” he says. It’s not just police officers. Cawley says that he questions the need for the 750 security officers in the schools, calling them “an army.” “In good times, it might have been something we could do, but in these times we have to question every expense,” says Cawley, who noted that in some schools security guards do provide needed monitoring of students as they move from place to place.  The costs of police officers became a hot one this summer when suddenly the cash-strapped school district was asked to fork over $46 million in backpay to the Chicago Police Department. According to officials, the Chicago Police Department had provided the officers at a discounted rate for more than two decades. Then suddenly demanded that CPS not only pay the full price of $25 million in 2012, but also pay back expenses incurred for the past three years. Though he wasn’t in CPS when these previous deals were made, and admitted he didn’t know the rationale for it, Cawley said the district had no choice but to make the back payment of $46 million to the police department because “it is the right thing to do.” Safety first Many of the high school administrators Catalyst spoke with, including those from selective enrollment schools such as Whitney Young and Northside College Prep, said the decision to keep a police presence in and around their schools wasn’t a difficult one. “We have 2,300 students here and what they were offering was chump change,” said one principal, noting that the district offered no guarantee that the money would be around next year. The administrators also noted that CPS officials had offered them more money after they turned down the original offer. “It seems like they are trying to find the right price,” said one principal. But school administrators said Emanuel and CPS leaders don’t understand the key role police officers play in the schools. An assistant principal at Gage Park High School said simply that the school is in a “high-risk, high gang area and we need the authority that police officers bring.” “Sometimes we need police officers to do things that extend beyond what security guards can do,” he said. Because they report to police sergeants, police officers often know when tension is brewing in the neighborhood or when fights take place off-campus and during non-school hours. They can bring that knowledge into the school and try to mitigate additional violence from happening on campus. Brian Richter, an assistant principal at Kelly High School, said keeping the police officers was less about problems inside the school and more about them outside the school. “There was not much discussion on this issue,” he said. “We feel like we are maintaining safety pretty good and we didn’t want to rock the boat.” Many of the administrators also added that the police officers were part of the schools, mentoring students and giving them a positive view of police officers.  Amundsen Dean Leonard Evans says police officers do prevention work and counsel students in tough situations. “We have two excellent officers. They do social work for our students and our teachers. We love them.” King College Prep Principal Jeff Wright agreed, and added that he didn’t quite understand why CPS or the schools had to pay for the police presence. “Where else do you find 1,000 people concentrated in one place on a weekday?” he said. “The job of the police is to keep the community safe, and we are part of the community.”

View article...

Keeping count of chronically truant students

By Joel Hood

5:48 p.m. CDT, November 1, 2011

Chronically truant students have long been a source of frustration for teachers and administrators, but particularly so in the last decade as the number of cases has grown steadily in Illinois’s public schools.
The issue is most pressing in Chicago, where 7.4 percent of students, some 30,000, were classified as chronically truant in 2010-11, having missed nearly one month of school.

The school report card data released each fall by the State Board of Education offers reporters an almost unlimited number of story possibilities.

But we chose to zero in on truancy cases because the state had pumped tens of millions of dollars into the problem over the last 10 years, only to see the problem grow by nearly 60 percent. The state blames that surge specifically on the escalating numbers inside CPS, which have more than doubled over that period.

We sought to examine the depth of this problem in the Chicago region. We studied chronic truancy rates for every school in Chicago and the collar counties. We compared those numbers with previous years going back to 2002. We compared individual school numbers to district and statewide averages.
You can find all of our school coverage here, and our schools report card data here.

We interviewed principals in the city and the suburbs, teachers, officials from the state and regional education offices, and several community leaders working at the street level to keep kids in school.

What we found was a largely disorganized effort and few resources to combat truancy, despite all the millions allocated for it. Chicago alone had been given about $60 million since the mid 1990s to address its rising truancy numbers, but spent the money elsewhere.
-- Joel Hood
 Join Trib Nation on Facebook for more of the how and why of Tribune journalism.

Copyright © 2011, Chicago Tribune

New Research Confirms Positive Outcomes for Mentored Youth

New Research Confirms Positive Outcomes for Mentored Youth November 1, 2011: New research from David DuBois, Ph.D., and his coauthors confirms that mentoring programs not only seem to improve outcomes for young people in the areas of academic achievement, behavior, and social and emotional health, but they also can improve these outcomes simultaneously. DuBois is a member of MENTOR's Research and Policy Council, a professor of community health sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a nationally-recognized researcher in the youth mentoring field. His coauthors on this recently-released study are Nelson Portillo, Ph.D., of the University of Central America in San Salvador; Jean Rhodes, Ph.D., of the University of Massachusetts Boston; Naida Silverthorn, Ph.D., of the University of Illinois at Chicago; and Jeffrey Valentine, Ph.D., of the University of Louisville. The research comes from what is known as a meta-analysis. DuBois and colleagues reviewed more than 70 evaluations of mentoring programs from the past decade and analyzed their findings into an overall report that has been published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. In addition to the ways mentoring improves outcomes for youth, the research suggests that establishing an effective mentoring relationship can happen for young people of all ages. As DuBois noted, these findings "speak to the universal importance of caring relationships for us as social animals, whatever our age." According to the report: Mentoring programs over the past decade have been most effective with young people who have pre-existing difficulties or are exposed to higher levels of environmental risk. The authors note, however, that most mentoring programs likely are not well-positioned to handle the demands of young people with severe problems. Programs matching mentors and mentees according to their interests have yielded greater benefits for participating youth. Mentees have benefited more in programs that are structured to have mentors offer guidance and act as advocates for their mentees. The authors offer the caveat, though, that it is important for programs to find ways for mentors to take on these roles without crossing boundaries and becoming over-involved in young people's lives. More research is needed to determine how well mentoring benefits hold up over time. "Mentoring is a strategic intervention that gives communities a way to multiply their support for young people," said DuBois. "But, funders and policymakers need to understand that they will get the best return with programs that use evidence-based practices, such as mentor screening and training. And, if they do, mentoring can be a strong and positive investment in the future of America's children." MENTOR's President and CEO Dr. Larry Wright congratulated DuBois and his coauthors, saying, "MENTOR is working diligently with our network of Mentoring Partnerships to improve the quality of service that programs deliver to mentees. The bottom line is that research, such as this meta-analysis, continues to inform us of what works in helping children achieve their potential, which is our ultimate goal." To read How Effective Are Mentoring Programs for Youth? A Systematic Assessment of the Evidence, go to http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1529100611414806. For more information on the research-based keys to making youth mentoring effective, download the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring, 3rd Edition™ at www.mentoring.org/elements.