InFocus: Chicago School Board Member Therese Boyle

School board member Therese Boyle met me for coffee in Beverly, across the street from the Barbara Vick Western Branch building, where she holds office hours with parents. A retired school psychologist, Boyle comes from a CPS family. Her mother was a CPS teacher, her sister is a retired principal, and her daughters currently work in the district.

She has a passion for redressing inequity, and she can talk about it in approachable ways. "Sometimes, I feel like the South Side is a forgotten place," she said. "I'd like to see resources distributed in such a way that the kids who need more are getting it."

As a board member, her style could be described as less sizzle, more steak."I don’t make a big fuss at the board meetings. I don’t ask a lot of questions [publicly], but I am asking a lot of questions,” she said. “I put them in writing,” Boyle said. She makes notes while reviewing the briefing materials before every meeting, then sends her questions to board staff, who relay them to the relevant departments for answers.

While she stays engaged and curious about the many issues before the board, from capital improvements to child care, her top priorities are:

1. Advocating for schools in her district. So far, she has visited 35 of her 46 schools. “How can I represent that building if I haven’t been inside that building and met the teachers and the administration, and seen the kids and looked at the classrooms? I’m fortunate that I’m retired and I can do it,” she said. On her visits, she keeps an eye out for repair needs in school buildings. She's also keenly aware of the challenges schools on the far South Side face in hiring young teachers, who might be likely to live in faraway neighborhoods like Bucktown or Lakeview and resist taking on the long commute. She's also interested in ensuring CPS addresses complaints made during public comment at board meetings. "I would like there to be some sort of a [way] to get those answers out to the public."
2. Special education. With fellow member Debby Pope, Boyle co-chairs the board's special education committee, though it is still in formation right now. While board staff are working to create a structure and schedule for the committee, Boyle is paying particular attention to concerns about special education services that come before the board. She's also aware that the general problems about getting teachers to the South Side can be heightened when trying to recruit special education teachers, because there are fewer of them to begin with.
3. Community Schools. Boyle is familiar with the community schools that have been funded through the federal 21st-Century Community Learning Centers grants. Those grants were briefly frozen, then released, back in the summer, causing consternation and holding up some planning for the beginning of the school year. Meanwhile, Mayor Brandon Johnson's decision to open 16 new Sustainable Community Schools, which receive $500,000 per year, raises questions for Boyle. "I'm very familiar with 21st-Century, and they do it with a lot less money, right?" So she wants to know what makes Sustainable Community schools better. "I want to see what's going on, right? I want to see, OK, who is your community partner? Why did you choose them? What are your goals? How many children are in the program? I want the details. How many days a week have they attended? What are they looking to do?" A new contract should be coming before the board in October to hire a research partner to examine the effectiveness of Sustainable Community Schools. Previous research took place during the pandemic, and found little evidence to suggest that Sustainable Community Schools affected student outcomes.

Soundbite: "I dream that the schools are going to be a safe place where kids can find comfort and learn. I think so many kids don’t feel safe."

ALL Chicago Fellows Analyze the School Board

After last week's board meeting, the Academy for Local Leadership held a debrief and board simulation for this year's cohort of ALL Chicago Fellows. Fellows. Fellows watched a highlight reel put together by ALL staff, focusing on Interim Superintendent/CEO Macquline King's remarks, board members' responses, and public participation.

The highlights gave fellows the opportunity to consider how to put A.J. Crabill's roadmap for more effective school boards into practice. Their biggest critiques of what they saw: too little attention to student outcomes, too much attention to "customer service." In Crabill's view of school boards, boards are responsible to "owners," meaning taxpayers and all residents of the school district. Issues that affect them--finances and broad governance--are what boards should strive to spend much of their time on. "Customer service" issues related to the direct needs of individual children and schools are better addressed by school district staff.

After dinner, the group got deeper into board thinking by taking part in a simulation of the recent controversy over the Acero charter school closures, which led to the board choosing to absorb five Acero campuses into CPS. Fellows adopted assigned roles and stances, reviewed the same financial information given to Chicago Board of Education members when they decided to take over five Acero campuses, and held a mini mock board meeting to decide what to do. [In the end, they postponed a decision until the next board meeting.]

One More Round for Hope Chicago

Hope Chicago announced this week that the group will sponsor a fifth graduating class through college, one more than initially planned. The organization houses a philanthropic effort to increase college-going and completion by providing full-ride scholarships to local colleges to the entire graduating class at each school, plus their parents. That's great news for those students, given the massive jump in college enrollment Hope Chicago has already sparked.

The chart shows a 26 percentage point jump in the number of graduates from Hope Chicago High Schools enrolling in two- or four-year colleges since the scholarships were offered.

"I've been looking at CPS college enrollment data for a long time, and I don't know that I've ever seen this type of dramatic growth for a single school, let alone a group of schools," said Alex Seeskin, former executive director of the To & Through Project, which collected and analyzed the data. "Some of the work is the scholarship for sure, but some of it is the pretty incredible support for schools and students."

While there are more questions to answer--like what are the Hope Chicago college students' rates of persisting and ultimately graduating from college--let's hope research can answer deeper questions about what we can learn from the Hope Chicago program before it vanishes.

News Flashes

New ICE Operation To Target Unaccompanied Minors: Immigration attorneys and journalists warn that ICE is expected to launch a new operation today aimed at pressuring minors who arrived in the U.S. on their own to leave. Last night, Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) advised parents and school staff that this operation is not aimed at all immigrant children and is not expected to involve raids on school grounds.

ChiArts Will Not Renew Its Contract Beyond 2026: The Chicago Sun-Times reports that the board of ChiArts has decided not to renew its contract with CPS beyond the end of the current school year. In a statement, CPS said no decisions have yet been made about the school's future. This comes on the heels of last week's announcement that EPIC Academy, a charter school in South Chicago, will likely close at the end of this school year.

Board Member Doings. Yesterday, school board members Michilla Blaise, Ebony DeBerry, Norma Rios-Sierra and Anusha Thotakura joined Roosevelt High School staff, CTU president Stacy Davis Gates, Ald. Rosanna Rodriguez and other local electeds at a press conference to protest ICE activity across the street from the school.

On Friday, October 24, board member Debby Pope will join UIC professor and former board member Elizabeth Todd-Breland at Women and Children First for a conversation about the new Karen Lewis memoir, I Didn't Come Here to Lie. Todd-Breland collaborated with Lewis and finished the book after her untimely death from brain cancer.