>From a Chicago Sun-Times report: Parents and other members of a Local School Council are asking Chicago Public Schools to sanction an organization that they say violated the district’s rules by electioneering at a back-to-school festival on school grounds.
Dad Adam Johnson, who has one child at Peirce Elementary School in the Edgewater neighborhood, said parents who walked up to an arts and crafts table hosted by the Common Ground Collective might have assumed it was a “kind of generic liberal, if not hippie-ish organization.” But if they picked up a flier about the upcoming school board election and scanned a QR code, they’d see the organization was making endorsements, he said. “The return-to-school celebration is, I think, supposed to be about the kids and about meeting the teachers, not about promoting a particular political agenda,” he told the school board earlier this month. CPS strictly prohibits political campaigning on school grounds. CPS’ ethics office is investigating what happened at Peirce. A spokeswoman for the Common Ground Collective said the group staffed a table and paid for the DJ at the Aug. 20 fair through its nonprofit, which is separate from the group’s two political arms. The spokeswoman also said the endorsements weren’t posted until after the Peirce Elementary event, pointing to social media posts timestamped on Aug. 24 as evidence. The Common Ground Collective says it supported “multiple” back-to-school events, but CPS says it only received a complaint from Peirce’s LSC. The controversy illustrates how schools have had to navigate some ethically thorny situations in the runup to the Nov. 3 election, when voters will elect all 21 members of the school board for the first time. Some see this race as a test of whether anyone can wrest control from the powerful Chicago Teachers Union and Mayor Brandon Johnson, a strong CTU ally who appointed the majority of school board members. As of Tuesday, $3.3 million has poured into the coffers of school board candidates. On top of that, political groups are spending on digital ads about candidates. Much of that has come from political action committees with ties to other entities and individual donors. That’s made it difficult for principals, parents and others to decipher who is truly behind an effort and whether it’s political in nature. Michael Novick 323-636-7388https://www.antiracist.org http://www.change-links.org CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: The contents of this email message and any attachments are intended solely for the addressee(s) and may contain confidential and/or privileged information and may be legally protected from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient of this message or their agent, or if this message has been addressed to you in error, please immediately alert the sender by reply email and then delete this message and any attachments. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any use, dissemination, copying, or storage of this message or its attachments is strictly prohibited. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43500): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43500 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/121399334/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
