Questions about Lake View public elementary schools...

[Chi-town Native]

Originally Posted by Avengerfire

Here is a school (a magnet) in Lakeview that is pretty decent that nobody seems to mention on this site.
The CPS is talking about "phasing it out." Which makes no sense to me whatsoever. The CPS says it is at 40% capacity. I am trying to figure out with so many yuppies living in the area (school address is 1650 W. Cornelia),why does the school not have a higher amount of attendance? Perhaps Hamilton should be taking overflow from Nettlehorst,Blaine,Hawthorne,Blaine, and other decent schools in the area. Christ when you have a school performing decently in the city you should be busing in kids (that have brains of course) to keep that school alive. If the CPS "phases out" this school there will be less incentive for people to want to stay in gentrified areas and raise a family.Hamilton should be made into a neighborhood school again.

Behold our new Secretary of Education. What a friken moron.
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"Hamilton's students perform well above averages for the city schools. Last school year, 81 percent of Hamilton students met or exceeded state testing standards, as compared with the Chicago Public Schools' average of 64 percent. The school was recently named a School of Distinction and a Rising Star School.

The school's accomplishments are not at issue, according to Duncan. "

"If approved by the board of education, the school's population - and staff - would dwindle until its eventual closure in 2017, when Hamilton's current kindergarten class would finish the eighth grade."

"A series of public hearings and community meetings will be held on these proposals, with a meeting addressing Hamilton Elementary at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 3, at the schools' central office, 125 S. Clark.

After considering input from the hearings, the Chicago Public Schools administration will present its plan to the Chicago Board of Education. The earliest that the board of education could vote on any of the proposals is Feb. 25."

Chicago Journal (http://www.chicagojournal.com/main.asp?SectionID=48&SubSectionID=141&ArticleID=6 837&TM=51915.34 - broken link)

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Fight people fight!

ha, well how about that - this is the only lottery school we made it in, we just got the call yesterday.

looks like a really solid operation, we're going to an open house there tonight for incoming kindergartners, looking forward to seeing it.

[chet everett]

Good luck! Sounds like things worked out pretty well. Thread spans three years!!!

Like I have said, if you start a couple of years BEFORE your kid needs to start kindergarten you actually have a decent shot at getting into a school that has some desirable traits.

The real problem is for folks that assume Chicago is like a normal place, where if you go house shopping the spring before you need to move that'll give you plenty of time to get registered. NOT A CHANCE. Even the good "neighborhood attendance boundary" schools get overcrowded with CPS' bizarro fixation on not risking any "under utilized" staff / buildings -- there is this mindset among the leadership that if the union contract is based on 34 kids per teacher any classroom with less than that must be goldbricking. Well, teaching is not like filling potholes -- the good principals do their damndest to make sure good teachers are not running screaming from having too many kids and when some yahoo of parent lets their kid miss three days out of every week guess what that does to utilization audits?. Doesn't take mmuch to see how geniuses from the central office come sniffing around for schools to "consolidate". Talk about a vicious circle. Ugh.

[Chi-town Native]

it's actually kind of funny that the school we were planning on is only a few blocks from here (St. Luke's), I've never quite understood the concept of purchasing a house just based on a school, but we also only have one child so the tuition wasn't a deal-breaker.

but yeah, some of these "newly improved" schools like Audubon are already bursting at the seams. a friend with a daughter there wasn't able to get her other daughter in, even with the sibling preference, due to massive enrollment from the neighborhood.

[Chi-town Native]

just a quick update that we checked out Hamilton and were definitely impressed. they have the same problem a lot of these schools do in that they don't have budgeting for a full day of Kindergarten so the parents have to raise that money themselves, but the requested amount ($2K) is certainly much less than a private school would be, and it's only for one year.

[Vlajos]

Originally Posted by Chi-town Native

just a quick update that we checked out Hamilton and were definitely impressed. they have the same problem a lot of these schools do in that they don't have budgeting for a full day of Kindergarten so the parents have to raise that money themselves, but the requested amount ($2K) is certainly much less than a private school would be, and it's only for one year.

And much less than daycare costs!

[Chi-town Native]

really interesting discussion about the schools in question here, parents with kids at all of them are participants:

Rahm’s Education Platform (Guest Post by HSObsessed) « CPS Obsessed