Community Renewal Society

A bright welcoming banner with blue and yellow lettering offsets the bleakness of the long, gray concrete wall across the street from Mahalia Jackson Elementary School. The canvas banner has cracks in it that runs across Jackson’s portrait, yet the face of the woman known as the Queen of Gospel beams out at the world. This is what Joseph Davis drives by most days. Past the blocks-long wall with a Metra track running atop it and several long underpasses below, past the banner and into the parking lot. He works as a janitor at the elementary school--cleaning bathrooms, tidying up the lunchroom. He likes the work. At 22, he’s been doing janitorial work at Jackson and other schools since he graduated from another Chicago Public School, George H. Corliss High School, in 2008. But there’s a chance he won’t be there long. Jackson is one of 54 schools that CPS plans to close. Its students will move to other buildings, the teachers will look for other jobs, as will all of the support staff. Davis sees his job of keeping the school clean as an important one. “When they do health inspections, they rely on us,” he says. He is worried about losing the job he has held since the start of the school year. “Everyone has a family. Everyone has to pay bills,” Davis says. “It’s really nerve-racking. I have this job now. Now my job is gone. We are pretty much just waiting to get laid off.” Unlike the teachers, that fought for CPS to institute a safety net if they lose their jobs through a school closings, there is little recourse for Davis to find another janitorial job at CPS. The Service Employees International Union, which represents Davis and other custodian and lunchroom workers at CPS, says that 2,108 custodians and lunchroom workers will lose their jobs if all of the 54 schools are closed. Jackson has two other custodians besides Davis, six lunchroom workers, and one lunchroom manager. [caption id="attachment_11488" align="alignnone" width="500"] Joseph Davis drives toward Mahalia Jackson Elementary School, where he works as a custodian. Photo by Lucio Villa[/caption] Davis makes $13 an hour and supports his girlfriend and their 3-year-old daughter on his full-time wages. Each day he cleans the bathrooms several times a day, tidies up the lunchroom after students eat, empties the garbage, sweeps the halls and cleans the classrooms at the end of the school day. CPS is contractually obligated to keep 821 full-time custodians in the district for the 681 schools at all times. Any reductions in the custodian ranks would first come from private or outsourced firms that CPS works with, which are non-unionized workers and hired on a contractual basis, according to Izabela Miltko, a communications specialist with the Service Employees International Union’s Local 1. But this doesn’t mean that CPS will be able to retain the staffers who lose their jobs from the closings, nor is the district legally obligated to, Miltko said. CPS did not reply to repeated requests for comment on the record. “Of course, we are going to fight for those workers,” Miltko says. “But it’s really glum out there. It’s hard to get jobs right now. We expect a lot of the people will end up with minimum-wage jobs, or worse, no jobs.” A report by Service Employees International Union, the Chicago Teachers Union and UNITE HERE, estimated that 15 percent of households in Chicago has a member belonging to one of the unions employing workers in schools, meaning many families will therefore be adversely affected by the closures.“It’s the toughest communities that will be affected, that are already recovering from poverty, violence and neglect” and who will then have to deal with the loss in income, Miltko said. Davis lives in the South Shore neighborhood, where the 2011 American Community Survey shows that 42.3 percent of families with children below 5 years old in the ZIP code live below the poverty line. Where he works, in Auburn Gresham, the poverty rate for families with children under 5 is 40.8 percent. Now--and he hopes for not too long--Davis will be another unemployed resident in a neighborhood that’s struggling to keep its head above water. As for Jackson students, 75 percent of whom are low-income, Davis sees himself in them. He spent his last year of high school living in a shelter with his parents. He relied on a few of his teachers to provide emotional support and, at times, something as simple as a clean T-shirt. “I understand some of the kids story,” he says. “When I see some of the kids come here with frustrations, I understand why they are aggravated sometimes. Some of the kids, they stay after school and just don’t want to leave because the teachers give them the attention they are lacking.” While there is a chance the school will stay open--it was one of 10 schools that hearing officers earlier this month suggested should be kept open, because of its high special-education population--Davis is already keeping his eye open for jobs. Ideally, he’d like a job with CPS, or with the private janitorial service he was working for before starting at Jackson. He may also go back to school and learn to be a boiler engineer, the person who oversees a building’s heating and cooling--a job he hopes will help keep him and his family afloat. “If it don’t go the way I hope” and the school doesn’t stay open, “I’ll be looking,” Davis says.

Under the current U.S. immigration law, there is virtually no relief for immigrants who have already been deported, particularly if they left they country without a judicial hearing. But there is the possibility of some relief in the proposed immigration reform bill pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to a panel of immigration experts convened by The Chicago Reporter to discuss the bill. The Reporter’s latest investigation showed that more than half of the 25,000 immigrants deported between fiscal years 2008 and 2011 from Illinois and surrounding states left the country without ever appearing in front of a judge. The U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement is increasingly employing these fast-track deportations, the Reporter found. A big chunk of the immigrants who faced fast-track deportation--11,743 between 2008 and 2011--had signed “stipulated orders of removal,” which waive their rights to an immigration hearing. But in many cases, immigrants who sign stipulated removals don't realize that they are waiving their rights to go through court, or that there may be ways to fight their deportation, said Mary Meg McCarthy, executive director of the Heartland Alliance's National Immigrant Justice Center, a Chicago-based nonprofit that provides free or affordable legal services to immigrants. [caption id="attachment_11479" align="alignnone" width="500"] Mary Meg McCarthy (right), executive director of Heartland Alliance's National Immigrant Justice Center, addresses the audience during The Chicago Reporter's Town Hall Forum "Still in the Shadows?" on May 13. Photo by Jonathan Gibby[/caption] McCarthy was part of the Reporter's Town Hall Forum “Still in the Shadows?” held Monday night in Pilsen. The forum included an interview with U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois’ 4th Congressional District and testimonies from an undocumented young Polish immigrant and a woman whose husband is currently in federal jail for attempting to cross the border multiple times. The audience of more than 50 was made up of members of the Pilsen community, many of whom are immigrants, as well as attorneys, policy makers and immigrant rights activists. The proposed reform legislation would create a mechanism to make sure that immigrants are properly signing stipulated orders of removal. "The Senate bill contains a provision that will allow individuals who signed a stipulated removal form to see an immigration judge," McCarthy said. "The judge will make a determination whether that individual signed that document knowingly and voluntarily." The proposed bill also cracks open a window for people who have already been deported. "The bill does provide a provision that allows individuals who are ordered deported and have been deported to return to the U.S. if their deportation is not connected to a crime," McCarthy said. "It is critical that we hold on to these provisions during the next couple of months" as the bill moves through the Senate, she said. Gutierrez, who was in Florida, joined the conversation by Skype at the start of the event. He said he was doing his utmost to get the bill passed with the provisions that would help immigrants in place, but there was a need for some compromise. “There is a broken immigration system,” Gutierrez said. “There is medicine. Republicans have certain medicine they want people to take to heal the system, and the Democrats have it, too,” said Gutierrez, referring to Republican’s interest in increased border enforcement and Democrat’s push for a path to legalization. What will really heal the system, Gutierrez said, is compromise. “It's like the doctor says--you have to take them both or you are not going to get well.”

A bill attempting to allow nonviolent, first-time offenders to avoid paying a bond so they could leave the jail while awaiting trial died an unceremonious death at its third reading in the Illinois House of Representatives last month. With a bill making changes to bond court failing to pass--for the second legislative session--  we thought it would be a good time to check in with an up and running initiative to make changes to Cook County’s broken bond court system. This program is the brainchild of Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who nearly a year ago introduced a bevy of changes to the county’s bond court. The changes came on the heels of a 2012 Cook County Justice Advisory Council study that found “the vast majority” of the 9,000-plus people then behind bars at Cook County Jail were there because they couldn’t pay their pre-trial bail. The study looked at the operation of bond court and pre-trial services at the Cook County Central Bond Court at the Leighton Criminal Court House from the first six months of 2012. Of the total detainee population in Cook County Jail, one of the largest single-site jails in the country, 66 percent had a cash bond between them and their release from jail, which would allow them to await a trial date on the outside. When Preckwinkle’s bond court program was first introduced in July 2012, the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice, a Chicago-based group of attorneys that promotes social justice, estimated that the program could improve thousands of lives by allowing more defendants to post bonds so that they can continue their school or work while awaiting trial. Preckwinkle’s program looked at several ways to target the bond issue. One solution was the Motion to Reconsider program, which offers people who are in jail a chance for a new hearing to have their bond amount reconsidered. Bond amounts are set by judges, and hearings to set bond for people who have been arrested take place in what is commonly referred to as “bond court.” Under Preckwinkle’s program, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office would help decide who goes into the new Motion to Reconsider docket, by sending judges and public defenders a list of everyone who is already in jail, or has been behind bars 24 hours with a bond of $100,000 or less.  Because most bail payments are10 percent of the bond amount, the list would focus on people who can’t pay $10,000. Preckwinkle’s program would also upgrade the meetings rooms where lawyers meet with their clients before going into bond court. Here’s a breakdown from the Cook County Justice Advisory Council study of bond amounts handed down to pre-trial detainees during the first six months of 2012:     Of all the detainees offered a cash bond, the largest percentage, 14.5 percent, had bonds set between $60,001 and $100,000. Those individuals would have had to pay between $6,000 and $10,000. At the lower end of the scale, where the bond for nonviolent and first-time offenders is most concentrated, 8.9 percent of the jail’s population was locked up, despite being required to pay a bail of less than $2,000. Since the Justice Advisory Council study nearly a year ago, what has actually changed at Cook County Court? Juliana Stratton, executive director of the Cook County Justice Advisory Council, gave a brief rundown of the changes:

• An upgraded space and an increased use of digital records, are going to the public defender’s office to help attorneys determine their clients' ties to their community, job or schools
• An $800,000 investment in additional space for pre-trial interviews, which will give the public defenders more space to interview defendants
• The Motion to Reconsider docket up and running

The county will be tracking whether reconsidering defendant’s bond amounts will make it easier for them to post bail. They’ll do this by following the number of bonds that are changed and whether a detainee then posts bail, said Stratton, but the data aren’t available yet. The county plans to review the data to determine the program’s effectiveness closer to the date the program was started. John Maki, executive director of the prison watchdog group the John Howard Association of Illinois, said his group hadn’t seen a significant decrease in people being stuck in jail because they couldn’t pay. Maki’s group, which keeps in regular contact with some inmates at different facilities from around the state, said the programs had a ways to go. “Our sense from the sidelines is that people … who could make bond if they had the money [are still being held],” Maki said. “We know that folks who end up in the justice system often do not have living-wage jobs. We should only be detaining people who post a violent threat to our safety, not who don’t have money to post bond.” In response, Stratton acknowledged that the Motion to Reconsider docket was still in its early stages. “It will take some time to make significant inroads,” she said. “Nevertheless, identifying cases for this docket are made on a case-by-case basis.  Since public safety is one of the primary concerns, some motions will be denied and some cases will not be considered for this call.” This post was updated on May 13, 2013, to note that 14 percent of the detainees who were offered cash bonds had the amount set between $60,0001 and $100,000, rather than the $6,001 and $10,000. A bail of less than $2,000, rather than $200, was set for 8.9 percent of the jail's population. We regret the error.

African Americans in Chicago suffer from high rates of HIV/AIDS, diabetes and hypertension, as well as childhood obesity and infant mortality. Because they’re disproportionately low-income, they are less likely to have health insurance, and even fewer have dental coverage, according to a fact sheet produced by chief medical officer of the Cook County Department of Public Health. But when looking at how to end these disparities, Dr. Linda Rae Murray, the chief medical officer, has a radical idea: take the focus off providing conventional, physical health-based lmedicine. Instead, to minimize the differences in the racial health-care gap in Chicago, everyone needs to take a long, hard look at the society and how it structures the medical system, Murray argues. Equality is needed, she says. “If you have social justice, you are more likely to have a healthy community and a healthy nation,” Murray says. The Chicago Reporter sat down with Murray following a focus group on the health of African Americans in Chicago led by Murray at the University of Illinois Chicago. A report from the focus group will eventually be used for a Congress on the State of Black Chicago that will take place at Chicago State University on June 1. The Congress is being put together by an illustrious list of big-hitters in Chicago’s African American community, including the educator-activist and long-time political worker Timuel Black; Ed Gardner, a businessman who used his wealth to help elect the city’s first black mayor; and Bernetta Howell-Barrett, former commissioner of Chicago's Department of Consumer Services and director of Chicago's Black United Fund. As the chief medical officer of the county’s public hospital system, she is well placed to understand where social ills intersect with health troubles. “If you have racism and discrimination, if you go to work and work 40 hours a week and still have poverty level wages, you can’t be healthy. Injustice makes people sick and kills people.” “If you really want to impact people’s health, you have to have policies that help people stay healthy,” she says. And right now, with Chicago Public Schools getting ready to shut down dozens of schools, Murray says the area could be watching a public health emergency happen in slow motion. “Our kids know nobody cares about them. If you go to a school with a leak in the ceiling, if you go to school and you don’t get a textbook until Christmas, that’s a clear message that we don’t care about you,” Murray says. “The closings of these schools destabilizes one of the last remaining institutions in these communities.” According to Murphy, schools are one part of a complicated web that includes healthcare, transportation, food and even leisure time. If communities are to be healthy she says, society needs to be committed to each strand of the web. Photo credit: riekhavoc (caught up?)

Neighborhoods across the city are desperately fighting to keep their schools open, many of them by arguing that the 50-plus closures suggested by Chicago Public Schools officials will devastate their already ailing communities. A report from the Chicago Teachers Union released last month looks at the devastation that the neighborhood schools were facing in another way--before the latest list of school closures came down the pipeline. The 73-page “A Tale of Two Schools” zooms into the day-to-day operations of two Chicago Public Schools in troubled neighborhoods. Simon Guggenheim Elementary School in West Englewood and Jacob Beidler Elementary School in East Garfield Park both have similar percentages of low-income students and are in communities facing high rates of violence. But one of them, Guggenheim, is on the list for closure, while the other narrowly escaped having its doors shut. The difference, the report argues, is that Guggenheim was deliberately starved of resources and had its administration destabilized by changing principals repeatedly in the past few years. The report calls the process “disinvestment.” CPS did not respond to repeated requests for comment, nor did the mayor’s office. While Beidler in East Garfield Park also suffered from lack of resources at times, the report argues the district gave it the opportunity to follow a school evaluation plan called 5 Essential Supports, developed by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research. The report argues that the plan provides a more comprehensive way of judging the success of a school. Meanwhile, Guggenheim was never given the opportunity. The report was written under a grant from Communitas Charitable Trust, a family foundation that funds education and community groups with a specific focus on supporting public institutions, according to Paula Baron, a trustee of the fund. The report uses a series of interviews and first-person testimony, CPS statistics about the schools and policy research to tell the stories of the two schools. It also uses these two schools as larger examples of school investment trends within CPS. Along with its release of the report, the teachers union announced its plan to register 100,000 new voters to oust Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the 2015 mayoral race. As well as documenting the struggles and, at some points, victories of the two schools, the report includes other dimensions. It describes the education received by those in Chicago’s low-income communities, which adds to the landscape of poverty, foreclosure and high rates of incarceration. Below are three of the main claims set forth in the report: CPS purposefully denied Guggenheim resources through a policy of disinvestment The majority of students who attended the Englewood school were low income--94.5 percent received free lunches as of the 2011-2012 school year--and the report contends that CPS did not do its duty in providing the school’s students with sufficient resources to overcome the challenges they face. For example, the report states, third-graders went without a trained teacher for five months after one teacher quit due to lack of support from administration. This then led to a large group of students falling even further behind academically. The result: “The percentage of [third-graders] meeting or exceeding state standards in reading plummeted from 44.4 percent in 2010 to 14.7 percent in 2011.” “Wraparound services,” which focus on connecting students and their parents to services to deal with learning or emotional difficulties, were “virtually nonexistent” at Guggenheim. The school did not have a counselor on staff for nearly six years--from the 2004-2005 school year to February 2011. The school’s psychologist was only part-time, and social workers were stretched too thin to deal with the needs of the students. The report also contends that having three different principals between 2010 and 2012 led to high teacher turnover and a lack of vision that prevented the school from implementing longer-term programs to help its students learn. Then there was the lack of teaching resources, the report found, from teachers being forced to pay out of pocket for their own journals and maps, to an ongoing shortage of basics like textbooks. The report claims all of these factors made lower test scores more likely and the school a candidate for closure. Schools are not only buildings, but homes for many students who may not even have one stable home Guggenheim had a high percentage of homeless students, with 22 percent of them “doubled up,” in a homeless shelter or living on the street. Academics is further down the list of concerns for these students as “homeless children have much more to worry about than understanding the daily lesson, practicing their reading, completing their homework or preparing for the [Illinois Standard Achievement Test]. They are concerned for their survival,” the report states. Guggenheim had a 28.4 percent mobility rate, or percentage of students who had transferred in or out of the school, in 2011. This was higher than the district average of 17.6 percent and the statewide average of 12.8 percent during 2011--2012. Switching schools could have a devastating effect on students, the report found. “Each time children change their school, they lose important mentors and friends. They often have to adapt to an entirely different curriculum, teaching style and school culture. Research estimates that because of these factors, students who switch schools lose 4-6 months of valuable academic time. This may even be a low estimate,” the report says. And school closings only exacerbate the problem of students leaving the school at high rates, the report says. “A school closing inherently causes mobility, forcing all students to change schools, but schools with high homeless populations have an even more difficult time preparing their students for the disruption, as well as tracking them once the school has closed.” Marisa de la Torre, a director for internal research capacity at the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago, has looked at the effects that closings had on student test scores both before and after they the closings were announced. In the 2009 report, When Schools Close, de la Torre followed 5,500 students from 18 elementary schools that were closed between 2001 and 2006.  She looked at the schools for 2-4 years before and after the closings. De la Torre found that once students left for their new schools the results in test scores were neutral but that there was a negative change after the closing was announced but before the move. “We think this has to do with the way closings were done in the past,” she told The Chicago Reporter recently. “The announcement usually took place in December, January or February, and so there were a few months in between going to the new school which caused some anxiety for the parents, students and teachers.” School disinvestment leads to a cycle of disinvestment for the community Fewer students mean less need for shops and businesses, and that affects the community as a whole, the report contends: “The district’s strategy would significantly reduce the likelihood of any future reinvestment or repopulating in the communities affected by school closure,” the report says. “If there is no local school to send their children, why would a family move to the area? If families are not moving into the area, why would businesses or the city spend money to beautify or provide new opportunities in the community?” And there is a larger political role, the report goes on to state: “CPS is creating a vicious cycle of disinvestment and population suppression that severely limits the ability of African-American communities on the South and West Sides to reemerge as thriving neighborhoods,” it says. “By closing neighborhood schools, CPS and Mayor Rahm Emanuel are declaring these communities dead zones that are unworthy of targeted investment.” Photo credit: Chicago Public Media

Here at The Chicago Reporter, we love what we do. And every now and then it’s nice to be recognized for it as well. The Reporter won seven Lisagor Awards Friday night honoring our investigations, photography and graphics in 2012. The awards are given by the Chicago Headline Club, which established them in 1922 to recognize great journalism in Chicago. They’re named in honor of Peter Lisagor, the Chicago Daily News' Washington bureau chief under his death in 1976. Twelve current former Reporter staffers went home with these Lisagor Awards: [caption id="attachment_11450" align="alignnone" width="300"] Chicago Reporter staffers Jonathan Gibby (left to right), Safiya Merchant, Angela Caputo, and Christine Wachter with their Lisagor Awards. Lucio Villa Photo[/caption] Maria Ines Zamudio won the non-deadline reporting award for her investigation “Dying for Attention,"  which looked into the cases of dozens of children who were killed by parents and other caregivers not long after the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services investigated their cases. Also honored with the award were Rui Kaneya, Kate Everson, Kyla Gardner and Kaitlyn Mattson. Christine Wachter won in the Graphics, non-daily publication (circulation less than 20,000) category for her graphics for “Subsidized housing, Wage theft, Juvenile justice.” The investigation “Minor misconduct” won an award for in-depth reporting for a non-daily publication. The story, written by Angela Caputo with the assistance of Rui Kaneya, Jonathan Gibby and Safiya Merchant looked at 17-year-olds charged with felonies who are still sent to adult courts, and why their numbers spiked since the state began treating 17-year-olds facing misdemeanor charges as juveniles. Photojournalism fellow Jonathan Gibby won the Lisagor for non-daily photography in the "Slammed: Photos of Juvenile Justice" investigation. Our look into the long delay faced by workers who file wage theft claims in “Waiting in Vain” won the Lisagor award for in-depth reporting for a non-daily publication. Maria Ines Zamudio, Rui Kaneya, Crystal Vance Guerra and Samuel Charles shared the award. Science, Health, Technology, Environmental reporting Television Tasha Ransom, Kimbriell Kelly, Jay Sondheimer, Steve Long, Ken Goss, Bill Barth,  WPWR-TV, “There is More to Being Gluten-Free” Public Affairs Programming Television Tasha Ransom, Kimbriell Kelly, Jay Sondheimer, Steve Long, Russ Sherman, Bill Barth, WPWR-TV, “Experts Talk About Sexual Assault and How to Defend Yourself”

It was the first truly warm day of spring, reaching a longed-for temperature above 80 degrees. Old men pushed their ice cream carts, the bells on them ringing as they moved. The sun filtered through the cracks between downtown’s skyscrapers and onto hundreds of marchers at this year’s May Day parade on Wednesday. The parade started at Union Park on the near West Side, ending in Daley Plaza in the Loop. The march represented a diverse mix of Chicago’s immigrants and their supporters: a brass band decked out in Guatemalan soccer jerseys, long-time activists against deportation chanting tirelessly and an 8-foot white cross bringing up the rear. Immigration reform and what it could bring to the community was on many people’s minds, both those excited for the immigration reform legislation  that’s pending and others critical of those looking at the legislation through rose-tinted glasses. Maria E. Gutierrez was marching with her co-workers at Interfaith Worker Justice, where she is national occupational health and safety coordinator. She, like others, knows that the proposed legislation, still making its way through Congress, will leave out some people and finds that to be a problem. In particular, anyone who arrived after Dec. 31, 2011, won’t be considered for legalization under the bill. A man grips a U.S. flag during the May Day rally at Federal Plaza in Chicago, where speakers talked about passing comprehensive immigration reform. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) also attended and told the crowd that Americans should stand together to achieve comprehensive immigration reform. Photo by Lucio Villa “I think [the legislation] won’t solve the problems of the immigrants at the moment. It’s not a real solution” to the many workplace problems facing immigrants, said Gutierrez, who is from Columbia. “Immigrants workers are exposed to the worst conditions in the workplace. They don’t get paid. They get exposed to hazardous chemicals.” While any immigrant worker remains undocumented, Gutierrez argued, there is still the possibility of abuse. “Until workers have a real status, they cannot claim those rights” that would help them stand up against wage theft and other problems, she said.

With that, Gutierrez held up her sign and chanted: “Si se puede.

From the practice of redlining in the 1960s to predatory lending in the 2000s, racial disparities in housing have long played out in Chicago. And for much of that time, The Chicago Reporter has been there to dig up the dirt on why it’s happening and who is profiting from it. This timeline looks at some of the Reporter’s key investigations, and the lawsuits and settlements that have come out of them.

Michael Tidmore and I recently met front of Daniel S. Wentworth Elementary School, a hulking brick building that sits on a residential block in Englewood. He wondered what’s going to happen to school buildings like this when they’re closed next year under Chicago Public Schools’ plan to shutter 61 facilities while consolidating students and staff. Tidmore is a 50-year-old youth outreach worker who coordinates after school programs at the local nonprofit Teamwork Englewood. He grew up in the neighborhood, which has been reeling from a housing market collapse that began with predatory mortgage lending first exposed by The Chicago Reporter in 2007. Vacant, boarded-up homes and apartment buildings have since piled up by the thousands, depressing property values so much that Tidmore said he’s seeing people he’s known his whole life walk away from homes that have been in their families for generations. “People are just letting them go,” he said. That’s taken a toll on schools like Wentworth where “we don’t have the numbers we had before,” he said. Like the other schools on the closing list, low enrollment has made Wentworth the target of the consolidation plan, which CPS officials estimate will save the district $43 million in operating costs each year during the next decade. When Wentworth closes, it will become yet another vacant building in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, students will move into the building of John P. Altgeld Elementary School, less than a mile away. In many ways, Altgeld is facing the same predicament as Wentworth. It’s located in an African-American neighborhood where thousands of Chicago homeowners and renters lost their homes when a wave of borrowers defaulted on their high-cost loans. What sets Altgeld apart is that, in sheer numbers, there are more vacant properties within the census tracts where its students live than any other school that will be impacted by next year’s closings, shows an analysis of the Chicago Department of Buildings’ vacant property registry by the Reporter. Add up the vacant properties within the census tracts where Altgeld and Wentworth students live, and they account for more than 13 percent of those logged by the city since 2010. Tidmore and I met on the 6900 block of South Sangamon Street and walked west through a residential stretch where we saw dozens of vacant multi-unit apartment buildings and single-family houses. Public officials have struggled to hold property owners--including the banks that they do business with--accountable for not securing problem buildings like we saw on our walk. They've spent nearly $1 million demolishing and boarding up properties like these in the area since 2011, the Reporter analysis of the Chicago Department of Buildings’ records show. Still, behind sagging boards, the windows and doors on many of the homes we saw were exposed. And they are just a small fraction of the 3,014 vacant properties within the schools’ attendance boundaries that the city has taken stock of since 2010. Tidmore sees the vacant buildings as crime magnets and he worries about kids having to navigate through even more of them getting to school next year. CPS spokesman Dave Miranda said that district officials recognize the potential dangers the vacants pose and are paying close attention to them as they create “customized safety plans” for each school affected by the closings. Despite the precautions, Tidmore bristles at the thought of children walking alone by the vacant buildings. “I just put myself in the shoes of a child,” he said. “Anything could happen. Someone could be lurking, and a child can be snatched up in a second.”

When Judith Luna went to work at Sears, she never expected to be paid so little that she would seldom be able to shop at the clothing retail store. Nine dollars an hour barely covered her living costs, and it was especially hard when the store barely gave her enough hours to qualify as part-time work. And there’s more the sale associate didn’t expect. Luna never expected she’d be part of a movement that is trying to change how much she and her coworkers are paid. “I believe that people deserve better than 8 or 9 dollars an hour,” said Luna, one of the hundreds of low-wage workers who walked off the job this week. “Especially when the employees are making millions of dollars downtown for these corporations.” She is a member of the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago, a small union that is organizing Chicago workers in retail and food service. The name of their campaign is Fight for 15, and it took to the streets Wednesday, holding an all-day march that picketed its way from Subways to McDonalds to Macys across downtown and the north Loop to support workers who had gone on strike for the day. Subway employee Jeremiah Green poses for a photograph in St. James Cathedral before participating in the rally. Photograph by Jonathan Gibby The goal is to raise the minimum wage at these stores to $15 an hour, an amount organizers argue offers a living wage. But the campaign is also offering something else--a model for nontraditional organizing that could offer a way to fight for better wages and working conditions at a time of declining unionization. It’s called “minority unionism.” It was used by the Walmart workers who made headlines around the world in the fall when they walked out of their jobs. Fast-food workers staged similar walkouts in New York earlier this month, and now it’s hitting the Chicago streets. Robert Bruno, a professor at the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois based in Chicago, calls minority unionism “a catch-all way to describe new ways in which workers are organizing.” The basis of minority unionism is that rather than organizing workers all in one workplace, a union like the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago will try to organize workers with similar workplaces and similar conditions around a similar set of demands. Hundreds of low-wage workers and activists march through downtown Chicago during a rally urging retail stores and restaurants to pay their employees $15 an hour. Photograph by Jonathan Gibby It’s used in workplaces where it would be particularly difficult to win a union vote--as in the case of the notoriously anti-union Walmart, or when the workforce is dispersed, as in the case of McDonalds or Subway franchises. “You are simply organizing the workers who want to be organized and share something in common,” Bruno said. “Ultimately, you want every worker who is working in the industry to be treated fairly and paid fair wages,” Bruno continued. “But you are not waiting to meet some arbitrarily defined number of workers in favor before you can act like a union, or before you can try to make things better for workers.” Under current union law, for a workplace to be legally recognized as unionized, more than 50 percent of the workplace has to have voted to be in a bargaining unit. This is called “exclusive representation,” Bruno said. A woman raises her fist in support of low-wage workers. Photograph by Jonathan Gibby The relative rise of organizing outside of the traditional one-shop way comes as the U.S. is in a record decline of unionization. The percentage of the U.S. population in a union has gone from 26.7 percent in 1973 to 13.1 percent in 2011, according to a 2012 report by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan economic research group. Meanwhile, the number of Illinois workers in a union was 14.6 percent of workers in 2012, down from 16.2 percent in 2011, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And even as job creation inches slowly upward, a disproportionate number of the jobs created since the recession are concentrated in low-wage sectors like Luna’s, the National Employment Law Project found. Minority organizing is part of an ongoing debate in the labor movement as to what the future of organizing should look like, Bruno said. While the debate is being hashed out, it comes with the added bonus: As soon as there is an interest in collectively trying to make changes in the workplace, workers can start pushing for them despite not having a union recognized by the National Labor Relations Board. As soon as workers start signing union cards, unions can “use whatever power they have to file lawsuits, to advocate for the workers,” said Bruno, and hopefully “negotiate some remedies.” Luna said that since she became a member of the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago, her manager has cut her hours from nearly 40 hours a week to only 20 a week. But that gives her even more reason to continue organizing, she said.

“This is why it is so important to unionize. There is no safety net at all at this point,” she said. “People don’t just organize just to organize. There is obviously a need, and there needs to be some change in Chicago.”

Lametrios West has made a point to separate himself from the trouble around him. Despite heavy rain and steady cracks of lightning, the 14-year-old Kershaw Elementary School student made his way on a recent afternoon to the nearby Teamwork Englewood, a community organization whose after-school programs draw boys and girls from the surrounding area. Here, he holes up to “get out of the neighborhood.” Staying out of trouble means closing himself off from the outside world. “It’s hard but I can do it,” he says. “By staying in the house, going to school, coming here. The only areas where I go is where I know people.” That’s going to be more difficult for young people like Lametrios next year, as neighborhoods throughout Chicago experience a massive reshuffling of students under a plan by Chicago Public Schools to shut 54 schools citywide. In Englewood and West Englewood alone, six schools--John P. Altgeld Elementary School, Elaine O. Goodlow Elementary School, Arna Wendell Bontemps Elementary School, Elihu Yale Elementary School, Granville T. Woods Elementary School and Benjamin Banneker Elementary School--will close, meaning many students will have to travel across unfamiliar turf next year. The danger Lametrios is trying to elude is grave. Nearly half of the 1,054 youths murdered in Chicago during the past five years were killed within census tracts where schools are closing. In all, these tracts only cover about a quarter of the city. West Englewood’s Goodlow Elementary had the highest number of young people killed within its tract of all the closing schools, with 37 overall. To the Southeast, Altgeld isn’t far behind, with 34 youth homicides. Within this environment, young people have taken to forming cliques along neighborhood lines. The block where Lametrios lives, at West 64th Street and South Lowe Avenue, falls under the umbrella of the Black Disciples gang, but it is also run by a clique called “Lowe Life”--what his Teamwork Englewood mentor Michael Tidmore calls “a gang within a gang.” Lametrios has some friends active in Lowe Life. “They be doing dumb stuff, so I don’t like to be around them ‘cause they do things I don’t want to do,” he says. “So if I know they’re [going] to do something, I would go in the house or something.” But as Tidmore explains, despite his best efforts Lametrios faces the constant possibility of being indicted by geography. He lives on Lowe, meaning he represents his street, and to some degree its gang. Tidmore presents Lametrios with a hypothetical scenario in which the youngster heads toward Paul Robeson High School, just one major block to the southeast. “Would those guys on Parnell [Avenue, one block east] connect you to Lowe Life?” Lametrios nods matter-of-factly. “Even though they might know [Lametrios is] not a part of that, just because he lives on Lowe, if they do something to him, it’s like they did something to all of Lowe,” Tidmore explains. On a map, it seems what CPS is proposing to do is straightforward enough. The receiving schools are all nearby those that are closing--for the most part, within a mile radius. But in neighborhoods like Englewood, crossing from one block to another can mean entering enemy turf. The distance between Daniel S. Wentworth Elementary School and Altgeld is just half a mile, but it involves crossing South Halsted Street, which according to Tidmore is a major territorial dividing line. In response to safety concerns, CPS has proposed measures to address potential issues. Its Safe Passage program, which stations adults along routes that students take to school to oversee their safety, has been budgeted a nearly $8 million increase in funding next year and will be implemented at all of the receiving schools. CPS has also said it will bus some affected students if their former school is more than 0.8 miles from the new location. But this will only be provided temporarily until current students have graduated. Back at the Teamwork Englewood headquarters, Lametrios zips up his hoodie and prepares to leave. Like a typical teenager, he plans to spend his evening at home playing video games. But he isn’t your average middle-schooler. Fitting in with the in-crowd has no draw for him. “I don’t want to end up dead. I wanna do something positive with my life,” he says. Next fall, Lametrios will remain at Kershaw for his eighth grade year, while elsewhere throughout Englewood, students from formerly separate schools will be merging. Lametrios says if he were one of them, he’d be worried about his safety. Again, geography is the main concern. “You could just be in the wrong place.” --Angela Caputo helped research this article.

(Click through to see just how much was spent on incarceration vs. education in communities impacted by school closures.) #map-canvas { width:500px; height:450px; } var map; var layerl0; var layerl1; function initialize() { map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById('map-canvas'), { center: new google.maps.LatLng(41.835618968127555, -87.74148995136714), zoom: 10, mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP }); layerl0 = new google.maps.FusionTablesLayer({ query: { select: "'col2>>0'", from: '1yEBSW1hSE-prbrPBR7MGoWEuVfHh5sHX3eota0Y', where: "col1>>1 >= 1 and col1>>1 <= 2318" }, map: map, styleId: 2, templateId: 2 }); layerl1 = new google.maps.FusionTablesLayer({ query: { select: "'col0'", from: '1_HW-r2Zx9_qmLqxRKLql5l75ClGcMJ8JavmnmlU' }, map: map, styleId: 2, templateId: 2 }); } google.maps.event.addDomListener(window, 'load', initialize); Torrance Shorter stands in the rain outside of Martin A. Ryerson Elementary School one recent afternoon in a last-ditch effort to keep the grammar school from being merged with the nearby Laura S. Ward Elementary School next fall. As parents pick up their children, he slips fliers through car windows and encourages them to come out to a meeting that he’s helping to organize. He stuffs more fliers into kids’ hands. “Tell your momma to come to the meeting this afternoon,” he says to one pre-teenage boy as they locked eyes. “Right when you get home,” he adds as the boy walks off. Shorter knows many Ryerson parents and grandparents. He and his wife live just across the street in the same house that he grew up in. “This is the grade school I graduated from,” the 6-foot-tall out-of-work cook says. Now, four of his own children attend the Humboldt Park school and he serves on its Local School Council. Ryerson is one of 54 elementary schools across the city that is slated to close next fall. CPS officials estimate that doing so would save the district $43 million each year during the next decade. By consolidating schools, CPS CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett has pledged to pour more money into the new schools that will replace the shuttered ones. But in many of the consolidated schools, the additional resources are likely to pale in comparison with what’s spent incarcerating people from the same neighborhoods, a Chicago Reporter analysis of more than a decade of Cook County criminal courts sentencing data found. Take Ryerson, for example. It’s located in a census tract where the cost of incarcerating its residents will top $80 million, a Reporter analysis of felony sentences handed down in Cook County’s criminal courts during the past 12 years. The majority of those corrections costs will be covered by state and county taxes. That’s more than twice the $48 million, in federal, state and city tax dollars, spent on educating students at Ryerson during that time, the Reporter and our sister publication Catalyst found in a joint analysis of CPS budgets and records maintained by the Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court. Add the incarceration costs for the census tracts where students from the other 53 closing schools live and the cost of those sentences amount to $2.7 billion, which is more than the $2.2 billion cost of maintaining the schools that are closing. “One thing that virtually everyone would agree on is that they would rather have the opportunity to spend on education … than the necessity, or perceived necessity, to spend on corrections,” says Robert Coombs, a spokesman for the Justice Center at the Council of State Governments. For nearly a decade, the national nonprofit has studied how states can increase public safety while lowering incarceration costs so tax dollars can be reinvested in public programs like health care or education. “It’s important to look at all of the money that’s being spent,” Coombs added. But he’s cautious about comparing the costs between school and prison spending because “People who are making those decisions are not always talking about spending the same money.” CPS spokesman Dave Miranda says the way the school district operates is that “the state and city tell us how much money we’ll get and we have to make it work.” Just about everyone who lives around Ryerson is tight on money, and Shorter says that the grade school has never been an exception. “Every year we have to hustle and pray to get football and basketball going,” he says. He and other parents have sold snow cones, raffled off a 32-inch television and even gone “begging” for donations along West Chicago Avenue to help create activities that keep students busy after school. The problem, he says, is that few people have money to give. “Sometimes we say, ‘Hey, let us get a quarter--or $2.’” Crime dominates the conversation as Shorter and I walk around Ryerson and nearby Humboldt Park blocks, where his kids and many of their classmates live. As we pass the teachers’ parking lot, he notes that a fence was recently put up, “not because they were stealing cars but because they were stealing parts off cars.” As he points out a series of trash cans and vacant houses that are known drug-stash spots, a stray German shepherd runs past through the alley and into a vacant lot. Shorter has worked with police for years to identify problem spots in hopes of reducing crime. The neighborhood wasn’t always like this, Shorter adds. “As a kid, [parents] told you, ‘Don’t step on anyone’s grass. Don’t go into anyone’s house when we don’t know them.’” “Now, the more we try to make it better, the bad element keeps it getting worse,” he says. When I ask Shorter what he thinks about the incarceration spending, his response is swift. “Now think if you would have put some of that [incarceration] money in the school building at first,” he says. At 39, he’s still seeing people that he grew up with struggle to get ahead because of past felony convictions. “I’ve seen too many young black men go from the schoolhouse to the jailhouse.” Despite the neighborhood’s challenges, one thing that it has going for it, in Shorter’s eyes, is Ryerson. In 2011, it was one of Chicago’s higher performing schools, according to CPS performance data. Conditions started to unravel last year when the principal was promoted up the ranks within CPS, more than a handful of teachers quit and the YMCA afterschool program pulled out. “The school was gutted” by the time a new principal came in, Shorter says. Despite the upheaval, he adds, “These kids come in everyday and perform their butts off." In his eyes, the bigger problem with local education is that, while Ryerson has done its part to shape students, most will filter into Orr Academy High School, a low-performing school with a chronic dropout problem, which is roughly a half-mile away from the grade school. “I don’t want my kids to go to Orr, but I can’t afford the alternative,” Shorter says. A son who’s about to graduate from Ryerson earned one of the coveted seats at Whitney Young High School next year, but the more than $2 it would cost each day to take two buses to get to the school, which is a little less than 5 miles away, is just too expensive. Charter school fees are too steep as well. “I told my son if something changes, Lord willing, he’ll go.” For now, “we just can’t afford it,” he says. As Shorter and I walk back to the school, he bumps into his eldest son, an 18-year-old Orr senior, who stopped by to check in with his dad on his way home. Shorter tells me that he’s seen too many of the boys that his son’s growing up with end up at the Cook County Jail before even making adulthood. “Some of them multiple times.” Shorter’s fear is that by closing Ryerson young people will become more angry and disgruntled. “And eventually, they’re going to act out, and you’re going to lock them up.” “You’re not just turning one school over to another school,” he added. “You’re hurting a whole community.” --Sarah Karp helped research this article.

There are undocumented immigrants in Chicago who crossed the border to get here; came on expired visas and were brought by their parents as minors. They are high school students, university graduates, dishwashers and mothers. Many of these immigrants are my neighbors. And they’ve all been waiting for the immigration legislation that President Barack Obama promised to pass while he was president. Now it’s finally here, in the form of an 844-page-long omnibus bill released on April 17. Border security is also an essential part of the new bill--the proverbial wall that must be gotten over before the long-awaited possibility of legalization can begin for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants that qualify within the bill’s strict requirements. To get to the first level of legal status, known as registered provisional legal status (RPI), undocumented immigrants would have to pass the application process, pay a penalty of $500 and any back taxes. But one hurdle comes in even before this. According to the bill, immigrants granted RPI can’t have their status officially adjusted until four conditions have been met. These include the introduction of the Comprehensive Southern Border Security Strategy, a new plan that mandates more security around the border fence, a widespread e-verify system and the electronic exit system; and the Southern Border Fencing Strategy, which puts forward a new plan for where additional fencing will be built on the border. Both are part of a widespread increase in enforcement that the legislation mandates. The conditions for these increases to be met before anyone can start on the path to legalization are: i) the Comprehensive Southern Border Security Strategy has been submitted to Congress and is substantially deployed and substantially operational; ii) the Southern Border Fencing Strategy has been submitted to Congress, implemented, and is substantially completed; iii) the Secretary [of Homeland Security] has implemented a mandatory employment verification system to be used by all employers to prevent un-authorized workers from obtaining employment in the United States; and iv) the Secretary [of Homeland Security] is using an electronic exit system at air and sea ports of entry that operates by collecting machine-readable visa or passport information from air and vessel carriers. Because the legislation is still in draft form, it’s unclear exactly what will be in the final bill if and when it passes. But looking more closely at the new strategy laid out for the border shows some of the problems with tying legalization to enforcement, immigrant rights advocates say. The Comprehensive Southern Border Security Strategy would aim to “maintain an effectiveness rate of 90 percent or higher in all high-risk border sectors.” Stretching across more than 2,000 miles, the "high-risk border sector" in the Southwest includes the cities of Tucson, Ariz., San Diego and El Paso, Texas. According to Homeland Security’s September 2012 annual report on enforcement actions from 2011, 327,577 immigrants stopped at the Southwest border in fiscal year 2011. Claudia Valenzuela, associate director of litigation at the National Immigrant Justice Center, based in Chicago, said some are concerned that the people charged with deciding whether the strategy is working may have biases. “Governors like Jan Brewer [of Arizona] might not have the most open, neutral position on this,” Valenzuela said. Brewer has continued to push for more border patrol along the Arizona border, despite the southwest U.S. border with Mexico having the heaviest concentration of border patrol in the country. And even if the border is deemed fully “secured,” she continued, it could only further prolong an already long process for those who have been waiting for years. “Already the legalization process is going to take 10 years for people,” Valenzuela said. “That in itself is sort of troublesome.” In addition, she said, the security build-up along the border mandated by the draft legislation is “a misdirection of resources.”  “We know that the number of entries have dropped,” she said. In May 2012, the Pew Research Hispanic Center found that net migration from Mexico had dropped almost to zero. The Security Strategy will include more border patrol, aerial surveillance systems (also known as drones), and a partnership with the Department of Defense to “increase situational awareness.” The price tag: $3 billion over the next five years.  

They pick the oranges that we eat to stave off a cold and the tomatoes in our sandwiches and salads. But their occupation is less likely to have health care coverage than any other major category. Seventy-five percent of farm workers in the United States don’t have health insurance, making them “by every measure … a vulnerable population,” according to a study written by The Kresge Foundation’s Health Program, which aims to reduce health disparities. The report, released in March, came as Congress was in the thick of debating immigration reform legislation. In particular, the status of “guest workers,” a broad heading that includes migrant farm workers, was a key sticking point in discussions over the recently-released immigration bill blueprint.  The resolution came in the form of the creation of a new “W visa” program for low-skilled jobs that would let workers switch jobs and eventually petition for a green card, said Daniel Costa, an immigration policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank that focuses on how public policy affects low-income people. But like the current visa program that brought many agricultural workers to the United States, Costa doesn’t expect there will be a requirement to provide health care. “There is a general decline in employer provided health care across the country,” he said.  Farm workers will likely only be given health insurance “if the employer provides it.” The study goes through a laundry list of health care disparities that the mostly Mexican and Central American migrant farm workers face. The report focuses on “hired farm workers,” which the United States Department of Agriculture defines as workers who do not own the farm but are hired as field crop workers, nursery workers, livestock workers, farmworker supervisors, and hired farm managers. They are often inadequately informed about how to protect themselves from pesticide poisoning and suffer from high rates of musculoskeletal disorders., In addition, they are also especially susceptible to heat stroke. Because many farm workers are undocumented and not eligible for health care and employers don’t always make workers aware of what insurance is available, they may not get adequate care for illnesses not related to farm work, like cancer, high blood pressure, anemia and diabetes. They’re also five times more likely to die on the job than “workers in all civilian industries combined.” The study compiled data from a collection of local studies that included medical examinations and looked at the trends apparent in the studies to bring together a national perspective from them  “because such national data does not exist,” according to the study. The Census of Agriculture, taken by the United States Department of Agriculture every five years, put the number of hired farm workers at 56,444 as of 2007. The Chicago Reporter sat down with a group of farm workers and advocates last summer, and found workers with concerns similar to those found in the study about working in the heat and being isolated from resources. According to a July 2012 earlier Reporter story:  These temporary agriculture workers are vulnerable to abuse because they are under the radar. No one really knows they're here picking fruits and vegetables or working in the corn fields. These workers live in isolated areas, without knowing where they are. Employers transport them from their country of origin to the fields. They're completely dependent on their bosses for food and shelter.  They are supposed to be paid $11 an hour, and have their living costs covered. The report notes that heat stroke and a higher risk of pesticide poisoning does not affect all farm workers equally. The study shows that the rate of injury among hired farm workers is almost twice as high as a non-hired laborer. In addition, few workers know much about their rights to workers’ compensation insurance, the study shows. In California, only 40 percent of undocumented male farm workers knew of the compensation program, even though they were covered under it. For this reason they may not seek treatment even when it is available; and even when they can get it, a wide number of factors could influence whether workers sought it out – English proficiency, immigration status, and gender. Altogether – the workers’ immigration status, the work itself, their lack of knowledge about U.S. laws and employers’ failure to watch out for their well-being create a “perfect storm” of health risks, the authors wrote. Photo credit: weknowmemes.com  

Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to discourage standard-of-living crimes like drinking, public urination and illegal gambling by doubling the fines and threatening to throw into jail for six months anyone who has skipped out on a hearing and then missed their court date. The move might be able to cut down on the crimes themselves, but there’s another possible outcome: adding yet more people who are incarcerated for non-violent crimes to the already nearing capacity Cook County Jail. The ordinance, introduced in February and passed by the Chicago City Council on April 10, is intended to make it clear that the list of crimes it addresses “aren’t victimless crimes,” as Rahm Emanuel says in the city’s press release. The fines for drinking, urinating or defecating on the public way would double from the current $500; for gambling the current maximum fine is $200. Then there’s the risk of jail time. If a person gets a ticket for, let’s say, gambling, the person can either pre-pay the fine or appear at an administrative hearing to contest the ticket. If the person does neither, he or she is assumed guilty and given 35 days to appeal the judgment. If no appeal is filed, the person becomes eligible for arrest on the charge of failing to appear. Though the police don’t have a warrant out for the defendant, if they come across the police at a traffic stop or for another ordinance violation they will be arrested. And if a person can’t pay bond, as many low-income people languishing in Cook County Jail can’t, the defendant could spend up to six months behind bars. Jail time as one of the consequences of missing a hearing is already in place for marijuana arrests--the ordinance would extend the risk of jail time to public urination, drinking and gambling. The Chicago Reporter took a look at the City of Chicago's database of all incidents of crime for the past year and found that between April 14, 2012 and April 14, 2013, 650 people were arrested for gambling, mostly for playing dice. Whet Moser over at Chicago Magazine’s blog looked at gambling data all the way back to 2001. He found 12,540 arrests for illegal gambling, and the majority of them took place in neighborhoods of color.  Tracy Siska, executive director of the Chicago Justice Project, said that even if public urination or drinking takes place at similar levels in most neighborhoods around Chicago, heavily policed black and Latino neighborhoods are likely to bear the brunt of the tickets. “There is officer discretion about writing a ticket,” he said, “and when you give people discretion like that, all too often it comes down to impose those consequences on people of color.” Sheriff Tom Dart, who runs Cook County Jail, and Toni Preckwinkle, Cook County Board President, have long been warning that the facility’s population is unsustainable, and that the only way to cut back is to keep only  people convicted of violent crimes in the system. The Reporter checked in with Dart’s office to find out how many extra bodies it would take to reach capacity. Sophia Ansari, a spokeswoman with the sheriff’s office, said the number changes every day. But as of April 10, 2013, there were 10,042 inmates. Ansari said there were 10,379 beds available, meaning that it would take only 337 people to fill the jail’s beds to capacity. The sheriff’s office keeps a table on its website showing how many people are in the jail at any one time and how much it costs to house them. When asked whether the crowding of Cook County Jail is a concern, Roderick Drew, a spokesman for the Chicago Department of Law, said “it is too soon to speculate about that. The goal is to deter the behavior, and hold people accountable for committing ordinance violations.” Photo by: Images_of_Money

She could tell by the way the phone rang.

“I was at work. I was actually in a meeting. Something about the way the phone rang. … I said, ‘Let me get this phone call,’” Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton recalled.

She picked up the phone. What would follow was a story that became known around the nation.

The call was from a friend of her daughter, Hadiya. “She was screaming and crying--and the squeals and the seriousness of it. She said, ‘Hadiya has got shot!’ It was awful,” Cowley-Pendleton said. “I screamed. I ran off from my meeting.”

Hadiya was killed in a park not far from her home on Jan. 29, only eight days after performing at President Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony--a fact that grabbed international headlines.

Here was a young girl--a majorette from a stable family at a good school--and then, just like that, there she wasn’t.

But Cowley-Pendleton is still here. Within days of her daughter’s death, she was thrust into the national spotlight as a voice against the senselessness of urban violence and an example of the grief that comes with it. President Obama mentioned Hadiya in his Feb. 12 State of the Union address, Cowley-Pendleton appeared in a public service ad advocating for stricter gun control and Al Sharpton interviewed her on his national talk show for MSNBC, among many other appearances.

The day before, and the day after. These are the two poles between which Cowley-Pendleton’s life has swung since her daughter’s death.

“How I am is a bit of a conflict,” she said. “I am deeply sad, for the lack of a better word, because my baby is not here. But I’m also proud of her, because all of this is because of her and the type of person she was.”

When The Chicago Reporter spoke to Cowley-Pendleton a few week after Hadiya’s funeral, she swung between a soft-spoken friendliness, playfully disparaging her messy home and then, at the mention of her daughter’s death, tearing up as if drowned under a wave of grief.

Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton looks out the window of her home. Photo by Lucio Villa

Cowley-Pendleton is a large woman with hair so short there is little of it. When you first see her, she looks familiar. Her features echo those of a daughter whose face has been all over the news. She has a smile that turns up at the corner and almond-shaped eyes that respond to any emotion.

The Bronzeville apartment where Hadiya lived with her mother, father and younger brother could have been any family home in the city. A frosted pound cake, minus a couple of slices, sits in a Tupperware container on the kitchen’s marble tabletop.

In her open-plan kitchen, a family friend is watching a cooking channel, two of her cousins stroll in and out of the bathroom, and the family’s Chihuahua makes a never-ending racket. This is one of the calmer days, Cowley-Pendleton says, when she can get out of bed in the morning.

On the fridge hangs a quiz of Hadiya’s called the “Quiz on Truth.” Cowley-Pendleton insists on putting the brown-and-cream corduroy cushions, lying haphazardly, into order on the family’s L-shaped couch before the interview starts.

A block from the apartment, it is apparent that the neighborhood is in mourning. Every tree on the block leading up to their condo is adorned with an oversized purple ribbon, the color for Hadiya’s high school marching band, as is the gate to their building.

A little further from their home, the larger detritus of the poverty of Chicago’s South Side lays flat and close on the landscape. A corner store has bars on its windows, as does the fish-and-chicken restaurant across the street. Behind it is an empty lot, full of pebbles and scraggly weeds that wave weakly during the bitter Chicago winter.

The cold realities of that world--with its rising gun violence, particularly on the South and West sides--are now a daily part of the life Cowley-Pendleton is leading.

Hadiya's Quiz on Truth. Photo by Lucio Villa.

She admits that, before Hadiya’s death, her main concerns were driving her daughter to dance classes, and having a ready ear for any of the usual teenage travails she expected Hadiya to go through. Now, she has a different focus: gun violence--and how to stop it.

“Because I was affected by it and I know what this feels like is the reason I am so passionate about it,” she said. “This is hard. It hurts tremendously. And I would love to be the reason why some other family doesn’t have to feel this way.”

She plans to start a foundation in Hadiya’s name.

“We come from a family of love, and I think, if more people focused on love than hate, there would be a lot more peace. So if I can come to you and I can give you love, … your consciousness and your view of the future should change,” she said. “I would just like for as few families to be affected by this. So, if talking about my baby helps, then that is what I want to do.”

Cowley-Pendleton doesn’t think Hadiya’s tragedy was more likely because she chose to raise her in the city--on Chicago’s South Side.

“I don’t look at it like someone has a better opportunity than me or my family because we are on the South Side. If you go to the park [where she was shot], it’s a very nice park, a very nice neighborhood,” she said.

Hadiya’s death happened because “there are simply just bad people in the world--lost people--and that is what you have to protect yourself from. Those that believe they have no hope--it’s unfortunate; it’s generally innocent folks that are affected by those lost individuals.”

“At Sandy Hook [Elementary School], I’m sure those people had thought, ‘This is an area where nothing like that is likely to happen,’” she added.

Purple was the color of the school where Hadiya was a majorette. Photo by Lucio Villa.

The two young men accused of shooting Hadiya, Kenneth Williams and Micheail Ward, are in custody at the Cook County Jail and have pleaded not guilty to the multiple charges of murder.

Underlying each statement about those who she says have little future is the hope and future that Hadiya had. Where there used to be a young girl with a ready smile, a love of reading books in long baths, is now the hole in Cowley-Pendleton’s heart.

“I’ve worked so hard on putting her in better situations, keeping her busy, making her well-rounded and still with the opportunity to be a kid,” she said. “What didn’t I do for her...”

For now, “I’m coping, because it’s what should be done,” she said. “When your child has done what she is supposed to do, it’s only right that you do what you are supposed to do. I have to keep her name out there, and I can’t allow anyone to forget what’s happened. Her death cannot be for nothing.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has come under fire for casting too wide of a net – some advocates have nicknamed it a “dragnet” - when it asks law enforcement authorities to hold people in local jails under its Secure Communities program. The federal immigration agency placed an “immigration hold” or “detainer” on more than 900,000 people between 2008 and 2012. That group included 834 American citizens, according to a data set obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) Immigration Project. In addition, detainers were issued on another 28,489 legal permanent residents. It’s technically illegal for ICE to deport, much less detain, American citizens, according to the National Immigrant Justice Center, a Chicago-based non-profit that provides legal services to immigrants. Detainers are required to be targeted towards the undocumented – but that isn’t always the case. TRAC obtained the data through a Freedom of Information Act request. Both American citizens and legal permanent residents still ended up being targeted as possible deportees, the data show. The numbers also show why the detainer program may compromise the constitutional rights of detainees, despite ICE’s recent steps to provide safeguards, advocates say. The fingerprints of anyone arrested in the United States are sent to the FBI. However, those fingerprints are also shared with the Department of Homeland Security under Secure Communities, a data-sharing program designed to find undocumented immigrants. ICE then checks the fingerprints against their files. If officials suspect a person is undocumented, ICE places a “detainer” on the individual until it is determined whether the person is eligible for deportation. So how did the 834 American citizens and 28,489 legal residents end up being flagged by ICE with detainers for possible deportation? James Makowski, a U.S. citizen, was one day away from his 23rd birthday when a detainer was placed on him in DuPage County on July 7, 2010. After he was arrested on drug possession charges, his fingerprints were sent to the FBI, and then on to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Although he became a naturalized citizen when he was one year old, federal authorities had not updated his immigration record, according to Makowski’s court file. Makowski spent two months in a maximum security prison. On July 3, 2012, he sued the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security arguing that Secure Communities violated the Privacy Act. The case is pending. In its report, TRAC lays out the reasons why this policy is a constitutional concern: Inadequate safeguards exist to prevent such mistakes from happening or to rectify them after they have happened. ICE has wide administrative powers to detain individuals it suspects may be present in this country illegally. Because these are considered "civil" and not "criminal" detentions, the protections afforded someone who is a criminal defendant or arrested by local, state or federal criminal law enforcement authorities do not come into play. “ICE is using a foreign place of birth as a huge factor in the decision to place detainers on people,” said Esha Bhandari, an Equal Justice Works Fellow at the national American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project based in New York Bandari said the way ICE uses the detainers creates confusion about citizenship status.The reason for a detainer is to allow ICE to carry out an investigation into whether a person is undocumented, Bandari explained. So any doubt as to an individual’s immigration status warrants ICE placing a detainer on him or her. And while most citizens and green card holders carry IDs, “having an ID doesn’t seem to be enough to prevent a detainer.” “Most citizens are not walking around with ID saying they are a citizen, and they are not required to do that,” she said. In addition, “they won’t appear in an ICE database because they never applied for visas. If ICE runs a search and gets nothing on them, they often assume they are not here lawfully.” In response to advocates’ concerns, Gail Montenegro, a spokeswoman for the ICE Chicago office, pointed to several policy changes the agency has introduced in the last two years to mitigate these problems. They include a new detainer form for local law enforcement, launched in 2011, that gives them a checklist to determine whether they think the detainee may be “an alien subject to removal.” ICE also now requires that detainees receive a copy of the form. And detainees can call a toll-free hotline for detainees if they say they are U.S. citizens or victims of a crime. However, some people still slip through the cracks. Mark Fleming, national litigation coordinator at the Chicago-based National Immigrant Justice Center, said there is a “long-standing practice” of local law-enforcement not providing copies of the detainer to people in jails. “ICE doesn’t follow up to determine whether a copy was given,” said Fleming, who is the attorney for Makowski, the American citizen who is suing the Department of Homeland Security. Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of political science at Northwestern University and long-time researcher on immigration noted the numbers obtained by TRAC don’t count the U.S. citizens that did get deported. After ICE puts detainers on them, “those people will continue to be held as aliens” in detention centers until they are deported, she said. If that happens, Stevens adds, they will have little recourse to fight deportation. “The standard is that if you are foreign born, the burden of proof is on you to provide clear and convincing evidence you are a citizen,” she said. The TRAC report notes that it will be difficult to determine what happened to the 834 American citizens issued detainers between 2008 and 2012. “The records ICE released to TRAC do not include any information on whether the detainer was ever lifted, whether the individual was ultimately deported, and if not deported, when they were released from ICE custody,” the report said.

Nannies, home-care workers and other domestic workers have long fallen between the cracks of employment law. Eric Rodriguez, executive director of the Latino Union, a workers’ center helping low-wage earners, compared it to the “wild west”--so few labor protections that minimum-wage and overtime violations run rampant in the industry. With a pending Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights Act, Illinois could join New York and California in rolling back the decades-long oversight that left domestic workers out of the National Labor Relations Act in the 1930s. State Sen. Ira I. Silverstein introduced the bill in February, and it has since been slowly picking up cosponsors. The legislation would require anyone hiring a domestic employee or care giver to have a written contract, defined shifts that include meal breaks and rest periods, and offer paid time off. Oversight would come from the Illinois Department of Labor. Silverstein said the legislation is “long overdue.” “These hard-working people deserve the protections given to many other workers,” he said. It would also amend a series of other acts to make sure domestic workers are taken into account--the Illinois Human Rights Act, the Minimum Wage Law, the Wages of Women and Minors Act, and the One Day Rest In Seven Act. Myrla Baldonado, an organizer with the Chicago Coalition of Household Workers and a former home-care worker, said the changes would have helped protect the rights she says were trampled on in her last job. Before becoming an organizer, she was being paid $4.50 an hour and dealing with a litany of verbal abuse while caring for a dying woman. “There is a care crisis in the country. We need more caregivers,” said Baldonado. But it will be hard to convince them to do the work “if [they] are not included in the labor laws and miss many other benefits that regular workers are getting,” Here’s what else we’re following in Springfield:

• The mandatory-minimum gun legislation [HB2265] we’ve been tracking is still in the House. The Illinois Department of Corrections made its own estimate of how much the jail time mandated in the bill could cost the agency: additional operating costs of $701,712,300.
• Legislation [HB3061] introduced Feb. 26 in the House would allow a person with low-level felony offenses--like theft, forgery or possession of a stolen vehicle--to have their records sealed.
• Juveniles facing life in prison in Illinois could have their cases reheard under a bill [ HB1348] introduced in the House Feb 16th. It would eliminate mandatory life sentences for anyone who commits a crime before the age of 18 and allow those already behind bars the chance to rehear their case.
• Home and house care workers in the Illinois Department on Aging’s Community Care Program could get a $1 an hour raise under a Senate bill, [SB2576] introduced March 12.

Photo credit: canonsnapper

No other school district in the country has attempted to do what Chicago Public Schools is planning to do this fall: close more than one in 10 school buildings, the vast majority of them in African-American communities. "With CPS losing enrollment, officials insist that the closings are needed to 'right-size' the district, to save money and to provide more resources in schools that will stay open," writes Catalyst Chicago Editor-in-Chief Lorraine Forte. "But many long-time observers and community activists aren’t buying that. They see no evidence that mass closings, the largest ever in a major urban district, will bring anything but more chaos and turmoil to communities that already struggle with social and economic woes." We put our heads together with Catalyst, which has devoted its latest issue to school closures, to dig a bit deeper into what's happening on the blocks where the children most affected by the school closures live. We found some pretty disturbing facts, like this one: Taxpayers have shelled out more money to incarcerate people from the impacted blocks than educating them. Here's our breakdown by the  numbers:  

In early March, The Salvation Army Mobile Outreach Unit was in danger of being kicked out of Uptown. The unit, a service of The Salvation Army Harbor Light of Chicago, offers on-site mental health and substance abuse assessments, referrals and hot meals to those in need, and provides transportation to a treatment facility. It makes a regularly scheduled stop at the intersection of Marine Drive and Wilson Avenue in Uptown. The unit initially received a 30-day notice by 46th Ward Alderman James Cappleman to find a new place to park. "While we were seeing success stories and improvements in quality of life for those in need, we still had persistent chronic homelessness that was centralized in the area near where the Salvation Army Mobile Food Truck provided services," Cappleman wrote on his website. After several meetings between Cappelman and representatives from The Salvation Army, protests by community members and a flurry of media attention, the two parties came to an agreement that allows the unit to continue providing services in Uptown. “Sometimes God uses what started out as wrong or bad and turns it into good, and that’s certainty what we have seen here," said Salvation Army Captain Nancy Powers, who oversees the program. "We have seen the attention brought to the needs of the homeless." —By Jonathan Gibby