Crony Capitalism in the Chicago Public Schools shows itself with shoddy workmanship! Lucky no children got hurt!
Dropping off my three kids this morning to school I see this!! A roof peeled off like a banana at Juarez High School Tuesday morning. 30 years in the construction trades I've never seen this happen to an institutional building. Looks like extremely poor workmanship and materials. Talked to multiple sources on the ground they confirm that the roof has been leaking since the day it was put on, yet Chicago Public Schools has done nothing about it. As usual minority schools don't get the attention, the workmanship or the resources that they need in Chicago.
I remember as a kid we learned that schools were safe places in case there was a disaster especially tornado.
And the generation before mine they learned that schools were fall out shelters in case of a nuclear attack.
Well looks like Chicago Public Schools cannot protect children from a wind storm. Or maybe its just continued crony corruption pay-to-play contractors that get fat contracts for shoddy workmanship? Either way no school should be this unsafe.
My kids go to this school and we will see if there will be a full explanation of why a 10 year old roof blows off in a wind storm when all the residential houses surrounding the school have no damage. Strange old houses with shingle roofs no damage, multi-million dollar school roof blows away! Poof!
For several months, students and teachers inside Benito Juarez Community Academy in Pilsen have seen bits of metal come loose from their seven-year old annex and sometimes they’ve had to put down buckets to catch leaks.
Steve Vidal is an art teacher who teaches in the annex. He said staff have had problems with the roof for a number of months.
“We’ve had pieces of metal flying from the roof,” he said, staring at the mess Tuesday. “You could hear the wind noise howling while you were in the classroom.”
Vidal said metal pieces “several feet long” had come loose from the roof in recent months.
“Thankfully nobody was outside at the time,” he said.
chicago.suntimes.com/...
"Bad workmanship," he wrote on Facebook. "Contractors hired by CPS to build our annex apparently didn't do the job right. Our classrooms on the 'new' bridge were flooded."
www.dnainfo.com/...
Parent advocacy group Raise Your Hand also criticized CPS about how quickly the annex deteriorated:
“It was a windy evening, but roofs shouldn’t be collapsing at CPS schools, especially ones that were built only 7 years ago,” Wendy Katten, director of the parent group Raise Your Hand, posted on Facebook.
“And the mayor should not go on a $729M campaign spending spree for new construction when there are so many existing capital needs at the district.”
chicago.suntimes.com/...