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An annual report from the Inspector General of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) revealed that millions of dollars worth of tech devices were reported lost or stolen “without appropriate search and recovery efforts.” The fiscal year 2023 annual report released Tuesday states CPS schools reported 77,505 tech devices as lost or stolen during the 2021-22 school year, totaling well over $23 million in original purchase price. The discovery, as a result of the district’s first post-COVID-19 inventory, calls the numbers “unacceptably high” and says the oversight process is in need of a “serious overhaul.” The report said the missing items included...

CHICAGO - Chicago Public Schools (CPS) reported millions of dollars in tech devices lost or stolen in their first post-pandemic inventory.The CPS Office of Inspector General (OIG) released its annual report for FY 2023 on Tuesday with statistics on misconduct, waste, fraud, financial mismanagement and sexual misconduct.According to the OIG, among the most significant findings, CPS reported an "unacceptably high percentage" of technology devices lost or stolen. The Inspector General says the lack of returns was due to flawed inventory and recovery processes.During the 2021-22 school year, CPS reported 77,505 devices, with a total original price of over $23 million,...

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on September 12, 2023, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. The transgender movement is pressing its agenda everywhere. Most publicly, activist teachers are using classrooms to propagandize on its behalf and activist health professionals are promoting the mutilation of children under the euphemistic banner of “gender-affirming care.” The sudden and pervasive rise of this movement provokes two questions: where did it come from, and how has it proved so successful? The story...

The largest children’s hospital in Chicago has created partnerships with local school districts to promote radical gender theory, “kink,” “BDSM,” and “trans-friendly” sex toys for children. I have obtained insider documents that reveal this troubling collaboration between gender activists at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and school administrators throughout the Chicago area. According to these documents, and a review of school district websites, Lurie Children’s Hospital has provided materials to school leaders promoting radical gender theory, trans activism, and sexually explicit materials in at least four Chicago-area public school systems: District 75, District 120, District 181, and District 204. According...

The Chicago Public Schools will pay 6.39 percent — an extraordinary interest rate by short-term lending standards — to borrow $275 million it needs to make a mandatory payment for retiree pensions before a June 30 deadline. That’s more than four times the interest rate a typical government would pay on the same borrowing deal ... It’s yet another sign of the dire financial condition of the nation’s third-largest public school system, which for months has had a “junk” credit rating from Wall Street financial institutions. CPS officials secured the $275 million on Monday from J.P. Morgan. It’s the final...

CHICAGO — Barbara Byrd-Bennett has resigned as chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools amid a federal investigation into a $20.5 million no-bid contract. **SNIP** The investigation centers on a $20.5 million no-bid contract at CPS related to an elite nonprofit education group that has long been at the center of city school reform efforts. Federal corruption investigators have also sought records related to some of Byrd-Bennett's top deputies. Byrd-Bennett, who has not been accused of wrongdoing, acknowledged when she went on leave that her presence could divert attention from the pressing affairs of the district as it tackles labor...

Moody’s Investors Service on Friday announced it had reduced its rating on Chicago Board of Education debt to one level above junk bond status. Moody’s downgraded the rating to Baa3 from Baa1 on the board’s general obligation debt. That rating applies to a total of $6.3 billion in outstanding debt held by Chicago Public Schools. That lowered rating, according to Moody’s, “reflects CPS’s continued reliance” on its reserves to cover ongoing operating expenditures, “particularly pension contributions, which will steadily increase in the coming years.” ... the lowered CPS rating also takes into account the city’s own credit rating, which also...

Chicago public schools are set to introduce a new Afro-centric curriculum, according to a closely-guarded copy obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The curriculum covers kindergarten through tenth grade and is designed to align with Common Core. It includes a web link to TheAfrican.com, a website whose publisher decries “fake-Jews” and calls the United States a “Zionist-occupied enemy territory.”

When these four teens were trying to come up with something to perform in Louder Than a Bomb, a youth poetry festival that reaches teens through after-school programs, they took their task seriously. Through their spoken-word performance of “Hide Your Schools, Hide Your Homes, Hide Your Children, Cause He’s Wrecking it All,” they unabashedly slammed Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel with a passion you can both see and hear. …

Chicago Public School officials say they’re canceling classes ahead of Monday’s bitter cold temperatures, after first saying they would be open. The reversal comes after withering criticism from the Chicago Teachers Union, though officials say they made the decision after (they) “evaluated the situation again.” …

Chicago's public schools have performed abysmally for years on many measures. But that's how schools with overwhelmingly low-income enrollments typically do. On the Program for International Student Assessment in 2009, U.S. schools with small proportions of low-income students did as well as schools anywhere in the world—while American schools whose enrollments were more than 75 percent low-income scored like schools in developing countries. In Chicago, low-income enrollments are the norm. Last year, an astonishing 85 percent of CPS students were from low-income families. Why is the proportion of low-income CPS students as high as it is when the citywide proportion...

The Chicago Public School system has removed 12 principals and assistant principals for allegedly falsifying free and reduced lunch forms for their own children, according to a report from the Office of the Inspector General and CPS. None of the 12 assistant principals or principals have been charged with a crime, but have been removed from their posts pending due process hearings. Their names have been withheld during the hearing process. The program costs about $100 million per year and is meant to provide nutritious meals to needy children. “The investigation by the OIG has uncovered continuing fraud in this...

Chicago - Here's a Chicago Public Schools math problem: a system hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, inner-city schools so strapped teachers are digging into their own pockets for supplies, yet on the Gold Coast there's a principal spending thousands to trot around the globe in luxury. Does that add up? Ogden International School Principal Kenneth Staral, who makes $142,000 per year, created an international studies program at the neighborhood school several years ago to teach students about countries, cultures and issues around the world. That program has since expanded to a high school on the Near West Side....

Little Village Academy, by virtue of the “authority” vested in them by Chicago Public Schools (CPS), is no longer allowing students to bring sack lunches from home. School officials have lost all faith in parents‘ ability and/or willingness to provide “better” nutrition for their children than schools can, so they’ve taken over kids’ nutrition and squashed the role of the parent. In Chicago schools, kids can say goodbye to Mom’s peanut butter sandwiches and hello to whatever school officials decide they should eat…all based on the whims of the principal. Conservatives are fond of the term “nanny state” to describe...

... Chicago’s pitifully short school day is getting even shorter. At five and a half hours, Chicago’s school day is already the shortest of any of the 50 largest districts in the nation. During the mayoral campaign, both Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel and a rival, Gery Chico, brought that up. Mr. Emanuel noted that a child in Houston gets four more years of K-12 instruction than one here. But now comes “Breakfast in the Classroom ” for 410,000 students. Most schools already offer a cold or hot breakfast before the start of classes. It’s free for the 86 percent of public...

Politics: Education Secretary Arne Duncan taught us Orwell this week, showing how some are more equal than others with his VIP list for admission to Chicago's best schools. Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there. Duncan, hailed as a miracle-working reformer in the Chicago school system he once led, didn't quite persuade that city's well-connected elites of the value of his reforms, given the number who sought placement in the district's better schools. Duncan insists it was just an appeals list on which parents could place kids who didn't make it into the schools they wanted. He says that he didn't do...

Editor's Note: The following column details a comparison between Catholic and public education in Chicago and its collar counties. Sawicki's piece can be seen as a measure of comparison for other big cities in the United States. It is an excellent, but succinct review of American public education and its waste of tax dollars compared to the private sector. Arlene Sawicki of South Barrington, Illinois is a long-time Catholic lay advocate on pro-life, pro-family issues. Mrs. Sawicki is vice-president of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer; a co-founder of Vote Life America; a member of Citizens for Community Values, Illinois Federation...

January 21, 2009 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Almost from its inception, the Weather Underground [WU] was viewed with great concern by the FBI. As a result, the decision was made to place a high level informant within the group to help keeps tabs on its members' activities. That person was Larry Grathwohl, a Vietnam veteran and the only publicly identified FBI informant who succeeded in penetrating the Weather Underground, serving in that capacity from August 1969 until April 1970. Prior to his service in the FBI, he was a member of the Cincinnati Police force. PipeLineNews.org contacted...

Mayor Daley suggested Thursday that high school be extended for a fifth year to defray college education costs now squeezing working poor and middle-class families.

$10 million spent annually by district for classroom subs... Driven by parental concerns about teacher absenteeism, the Chicago Public Schools for the first time will start scrutinizing schools with high numbers of teachers taking sick days. On any given school day in Chicago, an average of 1,500 teachers, about 6 percent of the teaching staff, call in sick or take a personal day, according to a Tribune analysis of teacher payroll records. The absentee rate is highest on Fridays, when an average of 1,800 teachers don't show... For each of the last six school years, Chicago teachers missed an average...