CPS in the news

The program that brought everyone from basketball legend Michael Jordan to actress Joan Cusack into Chicago Public Schools to serve as “Principal for a Day” is being suspended while officials revamp it, the Sun-Times reports.  The number of volunteer principals for a program started under Mayor Richard M. Daley in 1998 plummeted recently, dropping from more than 1,600 in 2009 to 635 in 2010, officials said Wednesday.

On Wednesday Chicago City Council members introduced an ordinance that would require property owners and managers to hire security guards to keep an eye on their land between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. if their property line falls within 1,000 yards of a school. Angela Caputo of The Chicago Reporter ran the numbers on the properties. Nearly half of the city's schools are surrounded by at least 100 vacant homes, she found. Roughly 10 percent, or 60, of the schools have 300 or more vacant properties within 1,000 yards. Caputo spoke with WBEZ's Eight Forty-Eight about what effect vacant buildings had on Chicago's hardest hit communities and if the proposed ordinances could do anything to improve the situation.

A Chicago school worker ate and secretly photographed school lunch meals for a year and blogged about how bad they were, developing a following of thousands of people along the way. This week, she is revealing her identity for the first time — Sarah Wu, 34, a speech pathologist in Chicago’s public schools — and releasing her new book, "Fed Up With Lunch" (Chronicle Books, $22.95). (Sun Times)

More on the school lunch blogger in USAToday.

A Chicago Public Schools elementary teacher who is HIV-positive filed a discrimination lawsuit against the district Wednesday, claiming his principal routinely punished him for tardiness despite special accommodations granted by CPS. (Tribune)