<div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: "Raymond Morales" <<a href="mailto:rmorales02@gmail.com">rmorales02@gmail.com</a>><br>Date: Aug 12, 2013 9:02 PM<br>Subject: SRO Contract Vote<br>
To: <<a href="mailto:sowersta@champaignschools.org">sowersta@champaignschools.org</a>>, <<a href="mailto:stuckeyly@champaignschools.org">stuckeyly@champaignschools.org</a>>, <<a href="mailto:lauriebonnett@gmail.com">lauriebonnett@gmail.com</a>>, <<a href="mailto:jamarbrown2011@gmail.com">jamarbrown2011@gmail.com</a>>, <<a href="mailto:Saveleyil@champaignschools.org">Saveleyil@champaignschools.org</a>>, <<a href="mailto:Chalifoux4BoE@gmail.com">Chalifoux4BoE@gmail.com</a>>, <<a href="mailto:scott.macadam@busey.com">scott.macadam@busey.com</a>>, <<a href="mailto:Leeke@champaignschools.org">Leeke@champaignschools.org</a>>, <<a href="mailto:Wiegandju@champaignschools.org">Wiegandju@champaignschools.org</a>><br>
Cc: <br><br type="attribution"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">Dear Board (please forward to those who I missed),<div><br></div><div>Thank you all for the opportunity to speak earlier. I wanted to explicitly state that I am utterly disappointed with your vote today. You followed through on a vote to allocate over $250,000 to a program that shows no proven educational benefiut and I am left laughing at how incredulous this to mask the tears. Do you have more students taking AP courses and getting higher AP grades as a result? Do you have better attendance at schools as a result of your program? How about an anonymous student self-reported sense of "safety" to suggest that students feel "safer"? None of you who voted yes even had the decency to engage me while I stood before you to even begin meaningful dialogue. Instead, your Chairperson roped me into dog-and-pony show for your "discussion" with Mr. <i>Thomas</i> (does anyone see the irony in that?). </div>
<div><br></div><div>Moreover, you went through the vote <b>with problematic terms</b> in the contract or <b>without vital information</b>:</div><div>For example, you agreed to pay the salary for an officer who will not service any school (Edison, I believe it was). </div>
<div>You explicitly know that there are Police Officers in your buildings with whom there are known problematic student/teacher-officer interactions that you cannot remove. </div><div>You don't know whether the items you are paying for in expenses (like the radio and computer each year) are even going towards those items. </div>
<div>You don't even have proof that the police officers respond to issues faster being off site vs on your premises. </div><div>With the shuffling of Black and Brown students within your district and with the new policies you employed internally, your statistics prove exactly what they were designed to do - to give a false sense of "success". None of you even asked how many of those students who do fall into the cracks are able to rejoin your educational system to be able to succeed as a metric for success for your program. <br>
</div><div><br></div><div>Shame on you all who voted for this item without that information and without having demonstrated proof that this tactic leads to better educational outcomes. Until you provide information that demonstrates that there is an actual different in the quality of education for each child exposed to police officers, then I will view your vote as a forgone conclusion filled with arcane and preconceived notions on the way to ensure the safety of future scholars. And admittedly, I take particular umbrage for all the Black and Brown scholars who are forced to endure this ill-begotten psychological experiment that you are conducting at the taxpayers expense.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Kids don't go to school to become friends with cops. They go to school to become sponges for knowledge and wisdom. If the cops really cared about those kids then hold a tournament where the CPD has teams of 5 to play 5-on-5 basketball with the kids or a cops vs students soccer game, volleyball game, etc. Don't give me a facade of wanting to ameliorate the relationships with the community as a pretense to implementation. I was born and raised in the The South Bronx and know that safety is paramount. But this isn't the way. Someone with the power to incarcerate walking around with a glock isn't the solution and you have no data to suggest it is. <br>
</div><div><br></div><div>If you want better educational outcomes, invest in teachers and increased mechanisms of civic engagement. Increase the number of teaching assistants, healthy food vouchers for parents to attend all day or to participate in the PTA, pay for teachers to have extra trips or resources for their classrooms, have grants for innovative ways to engage the curriculum for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. </div>
<div><br></div><div>Fortunately, I will be leaving this community within a year and my prison sentence at the U of I will come to an end so that I can leave back to The South Bronx where I will be safe from this ignorance. Until that point, I challenge you all to reconsider your position.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Sincerely,</div><div><br></div><div><div>Raymond Morales, Ph.D.<div>MD Candidate Class of 2014</div><div>University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign<br><br>ILL POETS SOCIETY project, Executive Producer</div>
<div>Snippet: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HffBKbcnWls" target="_blank">http://youtu.be/cAUl6Qq8qV4</a></div><div><br>Executive Producer & Host, The Show<br><div><a href="http://www.theshow1045.com" target="_blank">www.theshow1045.com</a></div>
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