In Late April, parents from Dewey Elementary Academy of Fine Arts, a South Side Chicago public school slated for an Academy of Urban School Leadership (AUSL) turnaround, collected laptops, iPads and textbooks in a room at the school to fight attempts by Chicago Public Schools officials to inventory the materials. About 40 people were sent to Dewey during the school day to gather numbers on how many books and items were being used in the school, and teachers were told to not to assign homework that requires books. This occurred prior to any Chicago School Board vote on Dewey’s proposed AUSL turnaround where all staff will be fired and CPS will enter a contract with AUSL to run the school.
What's AUSL Let's go back to June 2011.
That's when Emanuel was asked to give a commencement address to AUSL's first graduating class of Collins seniors. It was no surprise that he signed on, because if there's one education group in town that's long been wired directly into City Hall, it's AUSL. In fact, Emanuel made it a point to increase AUSL's clout on the Fifth Floor during his first weeks on the job.
He did that by tapping AUSL's former chairman, David Vitale, to become president of the Chicago Board of Education. The new mayor also recruited Vitale's AUSL colleague Tim Cawley (who commutes daily from Winnetka) to serve as CPS's Chief Administrative Officer. Before joining CPS, Cawley spent three years as a managing director of AUSL.
CPS officials were essentially counting the books to sell them before any action was taken on the school, which parents said was premature, in advance of the Chicago Board of Education’s final vote on school closings at its May 22 meeting.
Parents bravely opposed CPS’s disrespectful disruption to their children’s education, and were successful in ridding the school building of strangers and gaining “promises” from elected officials and CPS that the individuals will not return.
“I don't know if they’re taking them out of the building or taking it into their possession,” Matthew Johnson, Dewey local school council chairman, told a reporter. “We as parents are taking a stand. We’re saying, ‘You're not going to do that. We worked hard to get technology in this building. It’s disrespectful to us while we’re in the process of fighting for our school to be doing this.’”
“If you’re a woman of your word and these are just proposals, then taking inventory should wait,” Johnson said in reference to CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett.
In the aftermath of Dewey's rebuff of the CPS inventory team on Wednesday, scheduled inventories at Barton and O'Keefe elementary schools were both cancelled Thursday.
Dewey parent Matthew Johnson tells the story.