Updates

We started working as a coalition in March 2012 (other efforts pre-date this) in an attempt to make school discipline and safety data more accessible and transparent in the Chicago Public Schools. We’ve met with CPS staff and also with Mayor Emanuel’s staff several times.

Our most recent meeting with CPS staff was on March 19th. We have been promised a proposal from CPS administrators regarding the data about suspensions, expulsions and school-based arrests that they will make public. We should receive their proposal by April 2nd. We will review the proposal and decide how to proceed moving forward.

4/8/13
We are happy to say that we received a proposal from CPS on April 2nd based on our data request. Our coalition met on 4/3 to discuss the proposal. After our review, we crafted a response and submitted our counter-proposal to CPS on 4/8/13.

8/28/13
Members of Project NIA and Power-Pac attended the Chicago Board of Education meeting and spoke about the need for school discipline data transparency. As evidenced by the tweet below, Board member reviews were positive.

Board member Ruiz says Charlene Campbell & Mariame Kaba had "some of the most productive comments" today on discipline data transparency

— Catalyst Chicago Mag (@CatalystChicago) August 28, 2013

You can see the testimony below .

We have a meeting set with CPS administrators on 9/13 and we look forward to coming to a final agreement about the content and dissemination of discipline data that will be made public.

We met with CPS administration on December 5th to finalize the plan for making school discipline data more transparent. On December 16, we received confirmation that suspension and expulsion data will be made available on the CPS website in late February/early March 2014. The data will be broken out by school (excluding charters) and by various demographics (including race, gender, IEP status, ELL). We are excited by this development and would like to thanks Jadine Chou, John Barker, and Barbara Byrd-Bennett for working with us to achieve this goal.

12/18/13
Project NIA’s Mariame Kaba attended the Chicago Public Schools Board meeting to announce the data transparency agreement and to thank all of the stakeholders for their work.

1/8/14
Sarah Karp wrote an article about our successful campaign to increase school discipline data transparency here.

Stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks!