Although mention of refugees may conjure images of foreign conflicts and far-away lands, an upcoming charity dinner aims to bring the issues to the forefront of minds here in Chicago.

Partnership for the Advancement of Refugee Rights, an UChicago student organization, is hosting the November 19^th event. The Eat So They Can charity dinner aims to raise community awareness of refugee issues in Chicago and worldwide, with all proceeds going to local nonprofits.

The two beneficiary nonprofits, RefugeeOne and Heartland Alliance, will use the funds to provide food vouchers or direct meals to refugee families in Chicago in need of assistance. RefugeeOne is a refugee resettlement agency that provides assistance in areas ranging from finding housing to obtaining medical care to approximately 2,500 people a year. Heartland Alliance is a human rights organization with a wider scope, though it likewise provides crucial services to refugees in the Chicago area.

The event will include a buffet of multi-ethnic food, and PARR hopes to welcome a speaker from each of the nonprofits to give more information on the refugee issues in which they are involved in Chicago. PARR will also be sharing information on refugee situations worldwide.

The event is co-sponsored by a number of other RSO’s, including SJP, UCIRR, the Human Rights Program, ACLUofC, and UCDems. Tickets will be on sale for $5 in advance in Reynolds Club from November 14^th-18^th, or may be purchased at the door for $6. Eat So They Can will take place Saturday, November 19^th from 6:30pm to 8:30pm in the Library and Library Lounge of Ida Noyes.

Last year, the Chicago Weekly published a feature entitled Swept Under the Rug about University of Chicago housekeeping staff layoffs. Here’s an update on that issue.

Matt Wan

It remains to be seen whether the massive protests on Wall Street and other financial centers around the country will lead to any real change; but students at the University of Chicago can take to heart the fact that their own protests appear to have ended in victory.
Last spring, university administrators announced (during Housekeeper Appreciation Week, no less) that they were planning to outsource dormitory housekeeping jobs to a private subcontractor. Would the current housekeepers get to keep their jobs, or could they all be fired? That administration kept mum about that issue, leaving workers to fear the worst.

Students Organizing United with Labor (SOUL), a labor-rights group on campus, organized weeks of protests, demanding that the university guarantee that each worker would get to keep his or her job and benefits. They held sit-ins, teach-ins, study-ins and rallies for several weeks, but as the students left at the end of Spring Quarter, there were still no guarantees from the administration. It was possible that the protests would do nothing: even weeks of rallying can be forgotten in the long months of summer.

However, it appears that, whether they were the cause of it or not, protestors got what they wanted. On September 28, Karen Coleman, the Associate Dean of Students, stated in a letter to university students that all staff members were offered a choice between a job or retirement with a severance package. The housekeepers have a new union and a new boss, but at least they still have their jobs. Coleman wrote:

“More than 75 percent of the staff members affected by this transition were selected for new positions within the University or were hired into new jobs with ABM [the new sub-contractor]. Most of the remaining staff elected to leave the University and accepted an enhanced severance package. All housekeeping staff that applied for new positions are now working, either with the University or with ABM (with the exception of one staff member currently unable to work). We are pleased that this outcome means that residents and staff will continue to see many of the same faces in their buildings that they have come to know over the years.”

According to University Spokesman Steve Kloehn, 55 housekeepers were affected by the transition: 24 were hired by ABM; 16 found other University positions; and the remaining 15 workers chose to leave. Both the retiring workers and those now working for ABM received severance packages. Just as SOUL was about to celebrate, however, they discovered that its victory was more than a little bittersweet.

“Our job load has doubled,” explained Mazurie Wright, a housekeeper at the South campus dormitory, in a SOUL meeting last Thursday. According to her, out of the 16 workers in South before the transition, 8 remained in the dormitory as housekeepers. Wright went from cleaning one house in the dormitory to cleaning the entire first floor, which includes six lounges, four kitchens and ten bathrooms.

She also took a pay cut of two dollars per hour, but is now working an hour extra per day (this returns housekeepers to the amount of hours they were working a few years ago). According to Kloehn, because of the longer work day and a better benefits package, “total compensation is now higher” for the housekeepers. When a student at the SOUL meeting asked Wright if she made more or less the same amount of money per day as before, she answered yes – but that it doesn’t really matter when “you’re too tired at the end of the day to spend it.”

Not all of the housekeepers have taken a pay cut: some moved to different positions on campus, and a lucky few are now “Building Maintenance Workers,” or BMWs. Their job role is to respond to certain maintenance issues, such as heating/cooling or moving furniture, and they enjoyed a pay raise.

The point of the consolidation of Housekeeping and Facilities service was to “take advantage of the expertise and experience in Facilities Services,” according to Coleman; however, Wright says, “The quality of the work is going to go down because we just don’t have enough time.” Moreover, she says, it’s been difficult to adjust to the new, stricter rules and protocols that go with the new contractor.

However, Wright is still happy to have a job at the university – an institution she’s worked for since she was 18 years old. She stressed, “We have to say thank you [to students]. The first meeting, they said we’d be laid off.”

For now, Wright and the other housekeepers will just have to adjust to the new contractor and the new workload. Not much can be done until next year, when the housekeeping contract will be up for renewal. In the meantime, my guess is that SOUL will be occupying its time on Wall Street.

Despite a steady drizzle of rain, numerous children clambered about the playground at Butternut Playlot Park on a Saturday morning. Some of their parents looked on, taking shelter under umbrellas and rain jackets. The children were clearly enjoying the haven of greenery and jungle gym where they could run about together in the most fundamental expression of youthful energy.

This small lot of open space in Hyde Park exemplifies what should be the mission of parks across Chicago and beyond: to provide an area of community enjoyment and enrichment as a respite from city streets.

However, many parts of Chicago are not privilege to easy access to quality public parks. A recent series of reports by the Chicago Tribune drew attention to Chicago’s “park deserts”: areas in which the city’s self-established standard of two acres of open space per 1,000 citizens is not met.

The dearth of open space affects roughly half of Chicago’s population and 32 of its 77 neighborhoods, including many on the South Side. South Lawndale, Bridgeport, and Greater Grand Crossing, to name a few, are all among the ranks of neighborhoods lacking in sufficient park acreage by a range of less than 15 acres to more than 40 acres.

With seemingly more pressing issues at hand, from economic worries to issues of social justice, one might wonder why a few acres of park are of any concern. Perhaps parks are a luxury. That dismissal, however, would reduce a powerful presence to a mere patch of grass.

While the impact of a park may not be demonstrated in increased test scores in schools or reduced levels of violence, their positive, magnetic influence is apparent in the multitudes of citizens who flock to Chicago’s parks on a sunny – or not so sunny – day.

Furthermore, Chicago takes pride in the variety of its neighborhoods, each with a unique character that coalesces into the diverse yet cohesive unit of the city. In the efforts of these neighborhoods to retain and strengthen their sense of community while positively influencing the lives of their inhabitants, parks can act as cornerstones of significant merit.

On October 28th, forty three days after parents at Whittier Elementary School in Pilsen began a sit-in to prevent the destruction of the school’s fieldhouse, CPS delivered a letter signed by CEO Ron Huberman that formalized agreements made eight days earlier. The field-house will be leased to the Parent Committee for $1 a year as soon as the group officially incorporates as a nonprofit, and a library will be built for Whittier students. The Whittier Parent Committee officially ended the sit-in that same day, but some questions remain. The parents’ group issued the following statements qualifying their victory:

1) The location of the library has NOT been determined or agreed upon by the Whittier Parent Committee. The parents DID NOT agree to the library being built inside of the Whittier school as the letter from CPS states.

3) We want to make it clear that we are ONLY ending the sit-in portion of the struggle. The Whittier Parent Committee remains in control of the fieldhouse and the programming that is currently taking place in the fieldhouse. We ARE NOT abandoning the fieldhouse nor are we ending our fight for the library. The negotiations will continue!

In the meantime, Huberman has announced that he will be stepping down as head of CPS on November 29th, his resignation apparently hurried along by Mayor Daley, the Sun-Times reports. The Sun-Times’ sources suggest that Huberman’s replacement will likely be Terry Mazany, a former public school administrator and current CEO of the Chicago Community Trust with a much stronger background in public education.

ALSO:a slight correction. In the original text of this article I wrote that proving all of the Parent Committee’s allegations “would require a thorough investigation into TIF funding records, something no major media outlet has attempted.” While it’s true that thorough database reporting is lacking, there have been some important stories on the issue. Ben Joravsky’s pieces for the Chicago Reader are worth reading.

Read the original CW feature on the Whittier occupation here.

The University of Chicago’s president Robert Zimmer spends much of his time traveling the country, often to discuss a favorite issue of his: academic freedom. This week, academic freedom comes to the University of Chicago in the form of a three-day symposium. The full schedule is extensive over the three-day period and includes hot-button issues on a college campus such as student journalism, the admissions process, and responsible investing.

The biggest event of the series, held on Thursday, May 5 from 2:50 to 5, is a conversation with President Zimmer, Law School Professor Geof Stone, Law School Dean Michael Schill, and Chronicle of Higher Education Editor Peter Schmidt, followed by a keynote speech by Professor Stanley Fish. Geof Stone is a legal heavyweight with an extensive body of work on the First Amendment. In addition to being a professor at Florida International University, Stanley Fish was formerly Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Fish writes extensively on the politics of the university, particularly regarding campus speech codes and political statements made by universities.

The feature in this week’s issue of the Weekly is on the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a nonprofit organization based on the Northwest Side that’s been taking over failing public schools in Chicago and replacing the entire faculty and staff over the summer. They created this model, called “turnaround,” in partnership with Arne Duncan back when he was CEO of Chicago Public Schools, and now it’s being held up as an example for other cities. An article in the February issue of Philadelphia Public School Notebook gives a brief history of turnaround in Chicago over the past six years.

Yesterday the Tribune reported that another round of school closings will hit Chicago Public Schools after this year, with four schools being shuttered outright, four being consolidated with other schools, one no longer accepting new students, and five being “turned around” by the Academy of Urban School Leadership or CPS’s Office of School Turnaround. We’ve put together a Google Map to help visualize the geographic distribution of the schools to be closed. As the map shows, the fourteen schools are mostly located on the South Side, with only three on the West Side and two on the North Side. Public schools blog District 299 has the full 54-page CPS presentation on the closings.