Photos: CPS Students Rally In The Loop To Decry Imminent Budget Cuts
By Chicagoist_Guest in News on Feb 27, 2016 4:38PM
By Tyler LaRiviere
Over a hundred Chicago Public School students rallied and marched in solidarity of schools that are being harshly affected by the announced cuts to school funding.
The public schools were notified earlier this month that they should cut their individual budgets to make up for a steep CPS budget shortfall. One student spoke on how this will affect his high school:
"At Whitney Young we are expected to lose about two teachers, and some classes, we are going to see the number of students in the classes to rise...we are going to see art classes be cut as well," Nicholas Earley, a student at Whitney Young High School, said.
The students gathered in the plaza next to the Thompson Center at 100 W. Randolph St. with speakers from local high schools.
One of the student organizers, Charles Kotrba, said the schools' chief should look for other sources of funding for the schools before pulling the plug on many teachers' jobs.
"Forest Claypool will send out a memo saying we are forced to make these cuts...we have no choice, we have no money...it's lies," he said. "There are many things they could do, they could stand up to Bank of America and the other Wall Street banks and claw back hundreds millions of dollars that they have already paid in bogus interest rates and hundreds of millions of dollars they have to pay in the future in termination penalties."
After speeches and a few poems from the student organizers, the students marched around the Thompson Center and then took the march to the streets and headed southbound toward CPS headquarters on Madison Street, holding up rush hour traffic.
"Life’s getting hard for the future, so if we don’t stand up we won’t have a future," said Nidalis Burgos of Lincoln Park High School, one of the student organizers. "We are going to continue doing this until we get the education that belongs to us."