A few days ago I posted about my neighborhood school.
Darwin Elementary.
And its music teacher, Joe Panganiban. AKA, Mr. P.
Darwin is an increasingly rare thing in Chicago. It is a public neighborhood elementary school. It is open to any child in the neighborhood.
Just the kind of school Rahm wants to get rid of.
There are area of Chicago that are three and four miles square without a traditional neighborhood public school.
Darwin is a neighborhood public school where 65% of the students are low-income.
They have an excellent Art teacher, Adam Shortlidge.
And Mr. P.
To fund a class set of 20 ukulele’s, Mr. P went to Donors Choose and asked for $4,000.
This morning the grant is fully funded and the ukes are on their way.
Fred Klonsky 
Nice to see donor’s choice work out.
Yes. But what a shame that music and art teachers have to go begging for art supplies and instruments that should be provided by a public school system that cares about the arts.
Agreed.
Yes. Pathetic.
What is the cost per student in Chicago Public Schools? I just looked up the budget here: http://cps.edu/fy15budget/Pages/overview.aspx. I found a number for students here:
http://cps.edu/About_CPS/At-a-glance/Pages/Stats_and_facts.aspx.
Dividing the proposed budget by the number of students gave me a per-student cost in excess of $14,000. Please tell me I didn’t do this correctly. If there were 20 students in a classroom, it’s easy to calculate an operating budget: $280,000. There should be plenty to buy banjos, trombones, etc. There should be no trouble putting textbooks on each desk.
Putting a little money away for teacher’s golden years should be a snap.
So please tell me I’ve made a mistake. The price of corruption simply can’t be this high.
Walter, all the money is going up the sleeves of Pear$on–te$ting, te$ting, te$ting. Art? Music? No time for either (the CPS testing calendar from Raise Your Hand was on a post yesterday–HOW many weeks wasted–absolutely wasted–on te$ting & te$t prep$ (&–forget about textbooks {why, they’re part of Banned Books!}–our kids just have TE$Tbooks now). Do you all know that Pear$on bought Scott-Foresman, & is located in their former Glenview building–right here, our north suburban Chicago neighbor?
I say–just as they did in NYC–we need to organize a march–a HUGE march–sometime soon.
What would the world be without music? Every student in the world should be given the opportunity to learn to play an instrument.
Fred – I’m a parent with a kindergartener at Darwin – thanks for posting about this! Mr. P. is such a treasure – what a hard worker. This is the Facebook page I set up for the parents and community surrounding the school. Check it out if you have time. https://www.facebook.com/FriendsOfDarwinElementary?ref=hl