MEDIA ALERT: For Immediate Release

Press Conference/Protest:
Friday, April 15, 1:30 PM
City Colleges of Chicago District Headquarters, 226 W. Jackson Blvd., Chicago

Press contacts: Jessi Choe, jessichoe (at) gmail.com, 312-404-2463; Theodore Fabriek, fabriek21 (at) yahoo.com, 773-708-3561; Viviana Moreno, vama4a (at) gmail.com, 773-709-1156; Dan Kluge, SDS: dan.m.kluge@gmail; 763-227-4733

Students, teachers, front-line workers, to protest City College pinstripe patronage bankrolled by layoffs of frontline workers, cuts in student services

Chancellor spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on 'rebranding' consultants later hired into newly created six-figure management jobs while laying off frontline workers, charge students.

CHICAGO - Students, teachers, front-line workers, and their supporters will gather on Friday, April 15 at 1:30 PM at the district office of City Colleges of Chicago, located at 226 W. Jackson Blvd., to protest sweeping layoffs and massive cuts to campus budgets. The protesters plan to register their discontent at the District Office and demand a public meeting on April 27th with the Board of Trustees, Chairman Martin Cabrera, and Mayor-Elect Rahm Emanuel. They have not ruled out non-violent civil disobedience at the action, and plan to step up organizing efforts going forward as news of Chancellor Cheryl Hyman's draconian policies becomes more widely known.

Students, staff and teachers charge that severe cuts in frontline staff and student programs at the system's neighborhood campuses are being used to bankroll new pinstripe patronage jobs under the control of City Colleges Chancellor Cheryl Hyman.

Hyman's practices will accelerate a dynamic that pushes youth away from schools and towards the criminal justice system by vastly constricting the number of students who have access to higher education and developmental programs, say students and supporters. They argue that the system should be working to empower students with the tools to achieve their personal and academic goals by ensuring fair and stable employment for teachers and staff. Instead, the District Office has slashed frontline workers and student programs to bankroll superfluous top-level bureaucrats who answer only to Hyman, who they charge with also overseeing a process of union-busting, privatization and expansion of corporate interests in the system.

Among Hyman's proposals are a plan to end open enrollment, gutting higher education opportunities for thousands of students, and to eliminate campus names at each of the district's seven separately accredited colleges, including Harold Washington College, Kennedy King College, and Malcolm X College where students, staff and community residents had mounted a spirited campaign to name the school after the assassinated activist. Hyman has also slashed campus budgets by an average of 10%, at a cost of between $1 million and $2.5 million per campus, and fired hundreds of frontline support staff including tutors, while padding the district's central office with state-of-the-art renovations and new six-figure employees who had previously worked for her administration as 'contractors' in her 'reinvention' rebranding scheme.

Students and their supporters are mounting a number of demands to end what they characterize as corrupt, unaccountable practices. Those demands include an end to mayoral control over CCC appointments and the questionable prerogatives of the Civic Consulting Alliance; direct elections of the Board of Trustees and CCC administrators by enrolled students, teaching faculty and community representatives; the rehiring of campus presidents who were told recently by Hyman that they were all being terminated and would have to reapply for their jobs; guaranteed open admission to City Colleges, one of the fundamental missions of the CCC that Hyman has begun to reverse; an end to the centralization of CCC services and programs; an end to massive program and campus-based cuts; restoration of the independence and autonomy of the colleges; a return to local graduation ceremonies; reinstatement of study abroad programs; reinstatement of the college system's nursing programs which have been decimated in the past year; tenure for more adjunct professors; smaller class loads for faculty, particularly 'part-timers' who make below-living wages for growing class sizes; an end to the Hyman administration's practice of hindering the creation and operation of student groups; the renegotiation of all questionable vendor contracts which are typically approved with virtually no public oversight or transparency; and a forensic audit of the 'reinvention' initiative and all expenditures at the District Office since Hyman's appointment.

Many of these problems could be resolved with the firing of Hyman, say students, and the dissolution of the current board in favor of board members who are accountable to its community constituents when they are directly elected by students, faculty, and community representatives. A democratic hiring process would factor out administrators like Hyman and many of her high-wage hires who have no background in education.

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