{"id":36872,"date":"2013-05-28T18:36:12","date_gmt":"2013-05-28T17:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/chicago-students-erect-protest-garden-for-uprooted-schools-2\/36872\/"},"modified":"2013-05-28T18:36:12","modified_gmt":"2013-05-28T17:36:12","slug":"chicago-students-erect-protest-garden-for-uprooted-schools-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/chicago-students-erect-protest-garden-for-uprooted-schools-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Chicago Students Erect Protest Garden for &#039;Uprooted&#039; Schools"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hundreds of Chicago Public School students and their families are ringing in this Memorial Day holiday with a picnic protesting last week&#8217;s <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/headline\/2013\/05\/23-6\">announcement<\/a> of the largest mass school closures in United States history.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"image-right\"> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/sites\/commondreams.org\/files\/imagecache\/headline_image\/article_images\/cps_schools_464517_10151652827638454_367140161_o.sm_.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"\" class=\"imagecache imagecache-headline_image imagecache-default imagecache-headline_image_default\" width=\"275\" height=\"193\" \/><span class=\"caption\"> Students took part in three days of marches against school closures last week in Chicago&#8217;s West Side. (Photo: Sarah-ji) <\/span><\/span>During the picnic, which takes place Monday afternoon in the city&#8217;s Millennium Park, protesters will erect a temporary garden of giant paper flowers each representing one of the condemned schools, &#8220;to show the rest of the city and the world what is at risk of being lost in the mass closures\u2013what needs to be nurtured in order to grow and flourish instead of being uprooted,&#8221; they <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/events\/597190226965522\/\">write <\/a>in a statement announcing the demonstration.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;In Chicago,&#8221; they continue, &#8220;the fight against school actions and the fight against underresourced, overcrowded public schools are one and the same. This fight will not end with the unelected school board rubberstamping the Mayor&#8217;s policies.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;Every School Solidarity Picnic&#8221; follows last Wednesday&#8217;s Chicago Board of Education vote to close 49 elementary schools and one high school program and implement a &#8220;turnaround&#8221; at five additional elementary schools during which the entire staff will be replaced.<\/p>\n<p>Ninety percent of the schools targeted for shut down are in the city&#8217;s minority and low-income neighborhoods, prompting many\u2013including nine-year-old Chicago student <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/further\/2013\/05\/22-0\">Asean Johnson<\/a>\u2013to declare Mayor Rahm Emanuel&#8217;s education policy &#8220;racist.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>As <em>Black Agenda Report<\/em> executive editor Glen Ford <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.blackagendareport.com\/content\/chicago-teachers-build-movement\">writes<\/a>, &#8220;It\u2019s about further privatizing the public schools, destroying the union, and destabilizing neighborhoods full of people that the mayor and his big business cronies would, ultimately, like to expel from the city, entirely.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Monday&#8217;s gathering will take place from 12:00 to 2 PM CDT.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\">_____________________<\/p>\n<p>This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License<\/p>\n<p>This article originally appeared on: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/headline\/2013\/05\/27-0\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Chicago Students Erect Protest Garden for &#039;Uprooted&#039; Schools\">Common Dreams<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hundreds of Chicago Public School students and their families are ringing in this Memorial Day holiday with a picnic protesting last week&#8217;s announcement of the largest mass school closures in United States history. Students took part in three days of marches against school closures last week in Chicago&#8217;s West Side. (Photo: Sarah-ji) During the picnic, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-36872","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36872\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}