Monday night Sept. 30 at Ascension, the OP&RF Community of Congregations gathered a panel of people who are trying to make Austin a better place. Wrote about it here. Said there was more. Here it is:

Kathryn McCabe, exec director of the Cluster Tutoring Program, white, petite, her program ongoing since 1989, when they began tutoring at Pine Avenue United Church, do it now also at First United Church on Lake St. in Oak Park. Students who come for tutoring “are not well educated.” Reading skills are low: 70% are a year or more below grade level. A once-a-week conversation with someone with good vocabulary helps. Results are encouraging: 73% are at or above grade level after three years in the program. Most come to the Austin site, where they need volunteers.

Michele Zurakowski, Executive Director of Oak Park River Forest Food Pantry, also white…

* Cost of college?(from students)

Harmon: Aware of the problem and working on it. Yay! But what else is there to say to this question. from students? Have they been told the state legislators have a lot to say about this, so they have only Illinois state campuses in mind?

Lightford: Refers to MAP grant without explaining what it is, is not asked. Insider info again from KL. I looked it up.

The indomitable Lilly, blowing her horn again with highly questionable claim (for this CLAIM gathering): “I passed legislation [she passed
it?] for grants for junior college.” The horn blows at forums. “But I’d like to put on the table, [we should] get parents involved, [they can] tell us how to do it. We need to bring them to this room and ask them.” This room? None are present? Hey, parents, get with it, OK?

School lunches? (students…

Cutting to the chase (cliche alert), consider the telling (tell-tale?) points made by the four legislators at Julian Oct. 9, for not quite a closing to this tale of citizen involvement. (For Part One of the tale, go here. For Part two, here.)

 

Funding of state mandates: Depends on how you define mandate, said Sen. Lightford, a champion of compulsory schooling (and incidentally a mocker of home schooling). Compelling attendance raises cost of kindergarten, for instance. “It became very popular” to raise such costs as unfunded. She’s “lukewarm” about the problem, likes a “happy-medium” solution, she said.

Sen. Harmon draws the line at “significant” added costs, he said. Not wanting to put the questioner — one of three from CLAIM — “on the spot,” he asked for examples. She turned to ask the superintendent, who may have stepped out and in any case was not…

http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Charles.Osgood.Quote.36BF

(Continued from At Julian Oct. 9: superintendent, citizens with questions, four lawmakers)

We left our worthies at the starting line, the baton handed to the first CLAIM questioner.

Let’s listen.

First lady sailed a softball, asking the legislator-panelists how their records demonstrated them to be in line with President Obama’s program for education.

To which Kimberly A. Lightford, senator from Maywood, Democrat like the others on the panel, in office since 1998, officed at 10001 W. Roosevelt in Westchester, currently vice-chair of the Senate’s education committee:

She led the lowering of compulsory schooling age from seven to six, has goal of reducing it to five. Some parents objected to the six, but it’s a “perfect time” for early-childhood ed. She was very thankful that this year there had been “no deep-freeze” in funding for public schools.

Don Harmon of Oak Park, senate president pro tem: “We all like early-childhood…

At Julian middle school on Oct. 9, the district superintendent greeted the assembled “citizenry,” come for “tonight’s festivities,” which was putting too fine a glow to it in my book. But this was nothing compared to his effusive welcome “to our legislators,” two state senators and two state representatives, who had come to be grilled, more or less, by three schools-connected ladies, probably each a mother of a district student.

There’s “gridlock in Washington,” he noted, as if to contrast distant Washington with less-distant Springfield, where legislators have been locked in combat about pension reform for many months and only recently received their pay checks after the court ruled the governor out of order for punishing them for being locked in combat for so long.

Additionally, the citizenry had not materialized as expected, to judge by the empty chairs filling half the space in a small meeting room, for a…