Photo credit: Sarah Jane Rhee/loveandstrugglephotos.com.
Update:
Following a weekend of marches through the west side and south side of Chicago – marches that connected schools that would close and schools that would receive students from schools that are closed – hundreds gathered in Daley Plaza on Monday afternoon.
The CPS board will vote Wednesday as to whether they will close the largest number of public schools in American history.
On Friday CTU President Karen Lewis fired up memories of the Civil Rights Movement, calling the three days of marches across the city an “old-style civil rights march.”
At the rally this afternoon she mocked CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett’s claim that the protests represented the “status quo.”
Does anyone in this city believe the Mayor represents the latest chapter in the Civil Rights Movement?
Or that his honor, born into privilege on Chicago’s wealthy north shore, represents a movement of progressive change?
The status quo is ten years of failed school reform that has included one school closing after another.
Nothing has changed but the scale of the fail.
Earlier in the afternoon 26 protesters were arrested for blocking elevators on the first floor City Hall.
It is a foreshadowing of future acts of civil disobedience if the board votes to close schools.
“No matter what the board does on Wednesday, we are not done,” said President Lewis.
She promised that the CTU and allied groups would register 250,000 voters.
“And they won’t be voting for the Mayor,” she said.
Fred Klonsky 
Great Idea!