[Peace-discuss] Fwd: SRO Contract Vote

[Raymond Morales]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Raymond Morales" <rmorales02 at gmail.com>
Date: Aug 12, 2013 9:02 PM
Subject: SRO Contract Vote
To: <sowersta at champaignschools.org>, <stuckeyly at champaignschools.org>, <
lauriebonnett at gmail.com>, <jamarbrown2011 at gmail.com>, <
Saveleyil at champaignschools.org>, <Chalifoux4BoE at gmail.com>, <
scott.macadam at busey.com>, <Leeke at champaignschools.org>, <
Wiegandju at champaignschools.org>
Cc:

Dear Board (please forward to those who I missed),
>
> 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. *Thomas* (does anyone
> see the irony in that?).
>
> Moreover, you went through the vote *with problematic terms* in the
> contract or *without vital information*:
> For example, you agreed to pay the salary for an officer who will not
> service any school (Edison, I believe it was).
> 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.
> 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.
> You don't even have proof that the police officers respond to issues
> faster being off site vs on your premises.
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Raymond Morales, Ph.D.
> MD Candidate Class of 2014
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
>
> ILL POETS SOCIETY project, Executive Producer
> Snippet: http://youtu.be/cAUl6Qq8qV4<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HffBKbcnWls>
>
> Executive Producer & Host, The Show
> www.theshow1045.com
>
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