Statement by Maria Hernandez

Parent Leader and Former Local School Council Chair

Carpenter Elementary School
2150 W. Erie
Chicago, Illinois

Today, representatives of active parents from Carpenter Elementary

School and Andersen Elementary School in West Town are presenting written
evidence to the Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force, gathered in
documenting the federal discrimination complaint that was filed by Carpenter
parents, Andersen parents, and Designs for Change with the federal
government, based on discrimination against students because of their race and
color, national origin, and disability status.
Carpenter Elementary School in West Town is being "phased out" by a
Chicago School Board decision first made in February 2009, which violated the
Board's own policy about the definition of an "underutilized" school. Carpenter is
being phased out as part of the Renaissance 2010 plan. When Mayor Daley
announced Ren 10, he said that Ren 10 was going to involve closing "Chicago's
worst schools," the schools that had "consistently underperformed," so these
schools could "start over."
At Carpenter and Andersen, the Mayor's School Board completely
changed direction and began the process of closing two of Chicago's very best
schools. When Carpenter was closed, we served students who were 94% Latino
and African American, 95% low-income, and 26% disabled. Yet during the past
decade, our students have approached and exceeded the Chicago average on
the state ISAT Tests. In spring 2009, just a few months after the Board's official
decision to phase Carpenter out, 72% of our students met or exceeded state test
standards. We also met federal standards for "adequate yearly progress;"
Carpenter was one of a handful of schools to reach this high level of
achievement that serves over 90% low-income students and is a neighborhood
school.

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 In spring 2009, Carpenter scored 22 percentile points higher than Harvard
Elementary School, the highest-scoring of the lavishly funded Chicago turn-
around schools, although Carpenter and Andersen have, as you can see,
succeeded despite extreme hostility from the Mayor and Chicago Board
committed to shutting us down.
Beyond our test scores, Carpenter has been noted for three things:

• First, our school is the center of neighborhood life that holds our
neighborhood together. Two and three generations of families have
attended Carpenter. If you spend time at Carpenter, you will repeatedly
hear the word "family," since Carpenter has been a large family of
teachers, parents, community members, students, and elected officials—a
family that the Chicago Board is committed to destroy. The Mayor doesn't
want neighborhoods with a large percentage of low-income people in
West Town and other communities surrounding the downtown. He wants
West Town to be a bedroom community for affluent people who work in
the downtown.

• Mayor Daley knows that since Carpenter (as well as Andersen) are the
hearts of our neighborhoods, if he cuts the heart out, the body will die.

• Second, Carpenter has been known for our outstanding Fine and
Performing Arts Program, with dance, vocal and orchestral music, and
visual art. We have had many famous partners, like Joffrey Ballet. The
drastic limitations in the space available to carry out these artistic
activities, which I am about to describe, has destroyed this outstanding
arts program in one year, which took ten years to create. Ogden High
School has taken away our vocal music room, art room, and dance studio,
and made us combine orchestral music and our computer lab in one room.
Without these facilities, it has been impossible to continue our Fine and
Performing Arts Program effectively.

• Third, we are recognized for our high quality special education programs,
especially for hard-of hearing students, in which $6 million in special
facilities has been invested (for example, for special sound-absorbing
materials) . The program for our hard-of-hearing students, for which
people would transport their children from a wide range of neighborhoods
in the city, is now a shadow of what it used to be. We have lost staff. And
Ogden High School has broken the law by refusing to serve older hard-of-
hearing students and demanding that we educate them.

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 In our special education programs, we have also been recognized for
educating children with disabilities to the maximum extent possible in the
regular classroom.

One special high point that drew together many of our strengths took
place shortly before we were officially phased out by the Board. We held a
bilingual performance of a musical version of Cinderella, with students with
disabilities playing some of the key singing parts.
We were closed for "underutilization" —allegedly we had too many empty
classrooms. However, the floor plan of our school as it was used in the 2008-
2009 school year (Attachment A-1 and A-2), reflects the presence of students
from an over-crowded Ogden school, and our 26% of students with disabilities
(many of them severe) requires that a number of our special education classes
have eight of fewer students in them, which was not taken into account when the
Board calculated our space capacity.
The school system has done its best to cut Carpenter's enrollment, by
reducing the size of our attendance area in November 2008 and earlier (see
Attachment B).
In the summary of evidence we are submitting to the committee, we
document that the official school board policy under which we were closed says
in Attachment C that "significant underutilization" means that less than 30% of a
school's classrooms are being used for regular instruction (not counting vocal
and orchestral music rooms, dance studios, art rooms, and computer
labs—which are the very resources that help account for our success. Even
when we calculated our capacity using the Board's rules, it came up to about
51%.
Yet, the Board's "demographer" James Dispensa, disregarded the Board's
straight-forward rule and claimed that Carpenter and Andersen should meet the
utilization standard of 50% to stay open, while, he claimed, our space utilization
was only 23%. Respicio Vazquez, an "independent hearing officer" appointed by
the school system's law department who turned out to be a major partner in a law
firm that had received over $4 million from the Board from January 2001 to the

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time of our hearing date, presided over both the Carpenter and Andersen
hearings and helped railroad the closing of our academically successful school.
By failing to read the underlined passage on page 1 of the 2-page School
Boundary change policy that was the Board's official policy under which
Carpenter and Andersen were closed (see Attachment C). Mr. Vazquez shows
what the concept of independence really means in Chicago.
Tragically, a completely empty high school sits much closer to Ogden than
Carpenter (Near North High School), which is also shown in Attachment B.. It
was used for one year by Jones College Prep when major construction was
carried out at Jones. At much less cost, the Mayor could turn Near North into a
high school for Ogden, but he would lose the chance to drive our low-income
neighborhood out of West Town. As a young demonstrator at our closing
hearing told us, Real estate greed is taking our school from us."
Attachments A-3 and A-4 shows how our school (which never should have
been closed) was divided up for the 2009-10 school yea, The symbols of 23
single skulls show that Carpenter lost 23 classrooms or student resource
rooms. in just one year, Carpenter had only eight classrooms left (a loss of 74%
of our classrooms), compared with the previous year. But of the eight
classrooms left, we were forced to use five of them for two purposes. In three
classrooms, two classes (most of them for students with disabilities) were taught
in one room. For five groups of special education students, we were required to
break the law, on the orders of the school system. For two additional classrooms
and the library, we were also forced to use these rooms for two purposes, but in
a different way— so that, for example, instrumental music and computers could
only be taught half-time in their single shared room.
Working under these horrible conditions and the continuing loss of grade
levels drives away students and teachers, and the school system that caused
these problems then cynically argues that we need still less space. We are
about to face a new school year in which even more reductions in our space will
be made, and we have been told that we will soon be shut down.

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 However, we are fighting back hard, with parents, school's staff, and
elected officials working together, to support our discrimination complain and to
support the work of the Facilities Task Force
We have the deepest respect for Representative Soto for leading the fight
to pass the legislation that created the Facilities Task Force and to the members
who are devoting so much time to make it work.
Please, let's work together to pass additional laws that will save Carpenter
and Andersen and will make it unnecessary for other schools to live out this
nightmare. One key lesson of our experience in improving Carpenter and
Andersen is that parents, teachers, principals, community, and elected officials
must stand up and fight together.

Maria Hernandez
guazajal@yahoo.com
773-648-3117