Sunday, September 9, 2012

A few supplies needed

Thank you to all of you have volunteered.  We are still looking for people who can serve as classroom assistants--because we have to rotate people around and because the teachers are coming later in the day after the picket line, each classroom needs a supervisor who can run little games and team building activities during transition times when the people providing services are moving around from site to site.  Especially for the younger students we would like there to be someone constant in their classrooms because that is what they are used to.

Also we need a few supplies:
*some children's scissors
*a few boxes of crayons
*name tags for 150
*chart paper and markers for 4 classrooms
*clipboards and pens

If you have any of those and can bring them to 4554 N. Broadway, Room 326 today  between 1 and 4, or can email to the link on this site so we can arrange something else that would be great.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Information about our Strike School


We plan to run classrooms for 1st to 8th grade (possibly a separate classroom for Kindergarten) from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. each school day of the strike beginning September 10th.

The daily program will include 3 hours of academic instruction in reading, writing, and math with current events and social justice issues embedded (including the strike and union struggles generally and community violence in Uptown).  These 3 hours will be conducted by CPS teachers after they leave the picket line for the day.

The rest of the program will include lunch, daily P.E./team building, and arts of various sorts: visual arts, music, spoken word, dance, drama.  This part of the day will be staffed by parents, community volunteers and volunteers from local arts groups.

We need your help!

  • Help us find a site -- do you have connections with buildings in Uptown?  We would like to have all our classes in no more than two sites and one needs to be handicapped accessible.  We are looking at churches, Truman College, the ICA building, the bank building.
  • Be a volunteer: we need the following
            --a Kindergarten teacher
            --a substitute teacher (right now to cover 1st grade on Sept. 10 and 11 and 8th grade on Sept. 14)
            --people who can do daily arts programming for at least one age group (so 1 hour)
            --additional adult volunteers for 6 classrooms
            --safe passage volunteers for 8 to 9 shift and 3 to 4 shift
            --people with curriculum expertise
            --access to copying
  • Sign children up -- email us for forms.