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Mayor Emanuel, CPS Announce 7-Hour Day For Elementary Students

Read the full press release here. 

 

Mayor Emanuel, CPS Announce 7-Hour Day For Elementary Students 
After Input from Parents and Teachers, Elementary Schools Adopt 7 Hour Day Next
April 10, 2012
 
Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Jean-Claude Brizard today announced that elementary schools will adopt a 7-hour day next year and high schools will adopt a 7 1/2-hour day as CPS moves from the shortest school day and year of any major city to a calendar aligned with national averages. This announcement comes after meetings and discussions with parents who expressed concerns and wanted to be more involved in setting the length of the day.
 
“Knowledge is the key to the future in today’s world – you earn what you learn. By having the shortest school day and shortest school year of any major city, we shortchanged Chicago’s children,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel. “By adopting a longer day and a longer year, we are working to shape the future of our children for the better and give them an education that matches up with their potential.”
 
Beginning next fall, all elementary students will move to a 7 hour school day, and high school students will have a 7 1/2-hour school day, with a 75 minute early release one day a week.  Earlier this year, CPS presented the SY 2012-2013 calendar, which includes 10 additional days of instruction, moving CPS from the shortest school year in the country to a 180 day year that is on par with the national average. With the Full School Day, a student entering kindergarten next year will receive nearly 2.5 additional years of instructional time by the time they graduate high school. Along with implementation of the Common Core State Standards, a more rigorous curriculum that will better prepare students for college and career, and the new instructional framework, which will fundamentally change and improve the quality of teaching, the additional instructional time provided by the Full Day and year will give both teachers and students a valuable tool to improve teaching and learning in every school across the district.
 
The announcement was made at Disney II Magnet Elementary School, one of the schools that implemented the Full School Day last fall. Since launching the Full Day last September, students at Disney II have received an additional 185 hours of instructional time, with that time primarily focused on reading, math and science.
 
“We’re grateful for the example our Pioneer and Charter Schools have set, and their experiences, along with the direct input from parents across the city, have helped us shape a better, fuller school day,” said CEO Jean Claude Brizard.  “The changes to the Full Day reflect hours spent listening to parents and taking action based on their input, and demonstrate our willingness to work as true partners with parents to make decisions that will boost student achievement across the district.” 

Letter to Lisa Fielding, CBS Chicago

Dear Ms Lisa Fielding,

I have just returned from vacation and was made aware of your article "Longer School Day is Bad for Kids" from March 28, 2012, CBS Chicago news article.

You have taken liberties with my statement. I never claimed that our survey indicated that 53% of parents polled believed that a 7.5-hour day was "detrimental to the students at Skinner North." Inserting this opinion and overgeneralizing our survey results was very disappointing.

I said that even with additional money and a dedicated principal and teachers, 53% of parents who filled out our survey would prefer a day less than 7.5 hours. The concerns families had (according to their comments) were that they felt their children were overly tired, had less time to participate in extracurriculars, and that travel times increased school day length to almost 9 hours for some children. I questioned why CPS is fixated on a 7.5-hour day. I also questioned how CPS is going pay for this system-wide with a projected budget deficit of $700 million for 2013.

Please make the correction that our survey did not ask families if they felt that the day was detrimental.

Sincerely,

Dolores Fischinger

Tribune: "Survey: Most Skinner school parents prefer shorter school day"

The Chicago Tribune discussed the results of our recent survey of Skinner North parents: 

Parents who oppose a longer school day at Skinner North elementary school on Chicago’s Near North Sidehave conducted their own survey to gauge parental response to the 7-1/2 hour day.

According to the parents who conducted the survey, 53 percent of parents who answered prefer a shorter day. Surveys done earlier this year by the school’s principal found that only a small percentage of parents were not happy with the longer day.

Read the full article here. 

“Tell, Talk and Type Tuesdays”

 

(With thanks to Raise Your Hand)
 
Are you looking for a way to express your opinion about the 7.5 hour day? Most parents do not oppose some form of a longer day, but they want to ensure that an extension of time comes with quality and funding. Consider getting involved in “Tell, Talk and Type Tuesdays," in which concerned parents reach out to an elected official via phone call, email, or in person, every Tuesday.
 
Our state representatives voted in a law (SB7) without asking how it would be funded, and our aldermen voted on a resolution to extend our school day without asking about funding. It is really crucial that we voice our concerns and opinions to our elected officials on education matters. They often take votes that have a serious impact on the lives of our children, and we need to make sure that they understand what our priorities are and what we want them to support.
 
This Tuesday, we ask that you call your alderman and tell them our school day is about to be extended to the longest day in the nation for a large urban district with no additional revenue to go with it. We ask you to call them and question why they didn’t question how this day would be funded when they voted on this resolution.
 
You can find your alderman here:
 

Ward 19 rejects longest school day

Substance News has this write-up of the 19th Ward forum on the 7.5-hour day.

Southtown Star Forum: Stand for Children doesn’t get it

Read the original here. 

 
It was disconcerting to read that Mary E. Anderson, executive director of Stand for Children Illinois, can so easily reduce Chicago Public Schools’ parents’ genuine concern about the quality of education to just a few parents worried that their children’s “after-school activities might be disrupted.”
 
No, Ms. Anderson, we are not just a few parents, and we are not only worried about the hours after school. We are concerned about every minute of our children’s education.
 
Ms. Anderson writes that all CPS students need more time on core subjects and on enrichment, and teachers need to collaborate more than they do now. But the grim reality is that the system is near bankruptcy. We have to ask, how can CPS add high-quality learning supports to every school without more funding?

One Pioneer Parent's thoughts on the 7.5-hour day

 

My name is Chris Gladfelter and I have three children in CPS.  I have twins in kindergarten at our neighborhood school and a 2nd grader at Skinner North Elementary, one of the thirteen “Pioneer” schools.
 
Last spring, parents and teachers alike voted to move our school to the “open campus” school day which simply moved teachers 45 minute lunch break from the end of the day to the middle of the day.  We were happy to implement 45 minutes of recess and lunch to the school day and have input in the process.
 
Two days before school started this year we were informed of the “great news” that Skinner North had voted to be a Pioneer School and would be receiving $150,000 in funding for doing such.  At first I was excited about the funding but one of the first news articles I read indicated that the vote was split and very nearly didn’t pass.  The wheels started to turn and I was skeptical about the state of morale at school.
 
We are a relatively new and growing school with only 8 classrooms.  Morale up until then had been high and the community, simply by the nature of its size, was very tight-knit.  The first several weeks of the school year existed in a limbo like state with teachers, students, and parents awaiting the switch to the 7.5 hour day.  Having dedicated over 1500 hours of volunteer service to the school in the past two years I felt I had a pretty good finger on the pulse of the staff.  Morale, in my opinion, was at an all-time low.

Alderman Matt O'Shea Hosts Community Forum on the Proposed CPS 7.5-Hour School Day

Plan to Attend this Important Meeting Regarding Your Child’s Future School Experience!

Thursday, March 8
Morgan Park High School
7:00 pm

Our Alderman Matt O’Shea invites all 19th Ward parents with children attending CPS schools to his community-wide forum on the Proposed CPS 7.5 Hour School Day.

The 19th Ward Parents group will present their concerns about this unfunded initiative and CPS will have representatives present to respond to these and the public’s questions and concerns about the proposed longer day.

You can submit questions you would like to ask CPS ahead of time at 19thwardparents@gmail.com or https://www.facebook.com/nolongerday

Sun-Times Letter to the Editor Addresses the Longer School Day

One-size-fits-all CPS plan won’t work:


Mayor Rahm Emanuel is pushing hard for a 7.5-hour elementary and high school day that would be the longest in the nation. He and his appointed board want this for all 405,000 students in 675 Chicago Public Schools, and they have no funding dedicated for it.

Other major U.S. cities have adopted an extended learning time schedule at great expense. In Massachusetts, they needed an additional $900 to $1500 per student and committed funding to just 19 schools. Philadelphia used a $55 million federal grant for a longer day at nine persistently low-performing high schools this year. Houston has dedicated just under $20 million for 20 elementary, middle and high schools to extend their school days next year. Not one of these cities attempted to roll out the long day across the entire district, as Emanuel wants to do here. He is insisting that even the CPS schools with the highest test scores adhere to this mandate.

“Pioneer” schools in Chicago that adopted the longer day in September (with the CPS lure of a one-time $100,000 grant and a small one-time teacher bonus) find the children exhausted, cranky and unhappy in school. Families lose quality time together. Children are unable to pursue interests outside of school. It is wearing on teachers as well.

Since this proposal was announced, CPS has not listened to parents’ concerns on this issue. North Side College Prep, Whitney Young, Clissold, Mt. Greenwood, Sutherland, Cassell, Drummond, 19th Ward Parents, Raise Your Hand, and Six Point Five to Thrive have more than 7,000 signatures against the unfunded 7.5-hour day.

Without careful planning, adequate funding and real meaningful dialogue among all stakeholders, nothing of significance for our children can come from this initiative. Many parents believe the media aren’t giving the issue the coverage it deserves and are failing to ask critical questions about funding, staffing and safety.

On Feb. 19, CPS chief Jean-Claude Brizard told Fox News that the “peanut butter” effect of spreading a plan out across all schools has proven ineffective and that the plan should be targeted to specific schools based on their individual needs. He went on to say that the key to fixing the problems would be to reinvent the district that was never designed to serve all children and that he “truly believes principals and teachers at the school level know best how to make that happen.”

This ill-conceived, unfunded and poorly planned one-size-fits-all mandate won’t work for all students. We, as parents, agree with Mr. Brizard that improving the system will require examination of each school and reliance on the knowledge and expertise of principals, teachers and parents in each community to determine what is best for our children.

Rebecca Malone,

Mount Greenwood

Click here to read this letter at the Sun-Times site.