DON’T GET INVOLVED
By Dr. T
Adolescent psychiatrist

Dear T.B.,
This is a hard situation for you and it’s not fair for your parents to put you in the middle of their arguments. Growing up is difficult enough without having to help manage your parents’ conflicts.

Know that your parents’ arguments aren’t your responsibility. You didn’t cause them and it’s not your responsibility to fix them.
You should refuse to get involved with their fights. The next time one parent gives you a message to relay to the other parent, you can say, “I’m uncomfortable being in the middle of these things. I prefer that you speak with mom (or dad) directly.”

Similarly, if one parent starts to say unkind things about the other, you can say, “Please don’t talk to me about these things.”

Finally, focus on your needs and responsibilities. Your job is to go to school, learn, make friends and follow the rules.

Right now, you may have certain emotional needs related to the divorce. You should feel free to make these needs clear. For example, don’t be afraid to ask for some quality time with your mom or dad. Ask them to take you to dinner or a movie or to do something else that you’d like to do.

YOU’RE NOT ALONE
Matt Cullen
Walter Payton

Dear T.B.,
I have three sisters, so whenever an argument or disagreement occurs in my family I have someone to turn to. Since you don’t have siblings to turn to, make sure you’re not bottling up your feelings.

Discuss your issues with trusted friends and family members. I’m sure they would offer you great advice that’s more personal to your problems. And don’t be ashamed of what you are going through. You’re not alone.

In this specific situation, it seems like you’re acting as a messenger between your parents. Try to talk with another close family member—maybe an aunt, uncle or cousin—and have that person relay the message to your mom and dad.

By having another family member speak up for you, your parents will be more likely to recognize the impact their actions and decisions are having on you.

Also, I’d suggest you share your struggle with your friends. Close friends can provide the support and positivity that your home life might be lacking.

Good luck and remember that life goes on. You and your parents will overcome this hurdle!

Disclaimer: The comments by Dr. Christian Thurstone and The Mash staff are not intended as and should not be considered medical or psychiatric advice. Although we endeavor to provide information that is accurate and useful, we recommend that you seek the services of a competent, independent mental health professional in the relevant jurisdiction to the extent you require personal help or advice.

Gabriela Lambruschini
Stats
Favorite team: Bulls
My opponent’s athletic skills include … Amazing volleyball tryout skills … haha.
My dream sports moment is … to meet Michael Phelps and marry him.

Victoria Gonzalez
Stats
Favorite team: Bulls
My opponent’s athletic skills include … amazing all-state (NOT) track star … LOL.
My dream sports moment is … one Bulls game. I just want to attend one Bulls game. PLEASE.

Make up a word to sum up the Bulls’ season.
Gabriela: “Rose-less”
Victoria: “Coulda-woulda-shoulda”

Chicago’s Luke Donald won a cow (yes, an actual cow) when he won a Japanese golf tournament. What should a tennis player get for winning the French Open (which starts May 26)?
Gabriela: They should get a new Bugatti … ba-dum-ch.
Victoria: A pig?

Drew Brees and his wife dressed up as characters from “The Great Gatsby” and “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” when they went to see those movies. If that’s how they roll, what movie should they avoid?
Gabriela:  “The Human Centipede.” Ew.
Victoria: “Magic Mike”

(Getty Images Photo)

Caption this photo of Prince Harry (bottom, second from left).
Gabriela: “Air Force One and Prince Harry share a moment.”
Victoria: “It was all going good until the large man started to get on him …”

Chicago Tribune
The team was supposed to play Taft in the first round of playoffs Friday evening. But the school informed the Illinois High School Association that it would forfeit the game–and hence the playoffs–because there were “not enough players to play the game,” said IHSA assistant executive director Craig Anderson.

Anderson said he was told by the school’s athletic director, Chris Livatino, that the decision was made “because of suspensions and disciplining of players.”

“This would have been the opening game,” Anderson said. “I’m sure it’s disappointing.”

Livatino could not be reached for comment this morning.

In a letter to parents and guardians, ETHS Supt. Eric Witherspoon said the district had received a report that girls at the school had sent “inappropriate photos of themselves to ETHS boys who were members of the varsity baseball team, and some of the boys, in turn, were circulating the inappropriate photos.”

“Upon receiving this report, school administration initiated an investigation into the facts of the situation to determine what occurred,” Witherspoon said. “Appropriate actions have been taken.”

In the letter, Witherspoon cautioned that “the incident above is not an isolated one. We know that as more and more young people become connected in the digital age, sexting will remain a top concern for parents and educators. Please take the time to educate yourself and your child about the consequences of sexting.”

The Evanston Police Department and the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services declined to take any action, according to the letter.

Indiana’s George Hill celebrates the Pacers’ Game 6 victory over the N.Y. Knicks on Saturday to advance to the Eastern Conference finals against Miami. (Getty Images Photo)

By Hunter Bailey
Evanston Township

As an NBA fan, I was incredibly excited for this year’s playoffs. With so much young talent and good matchups, it looked like it was going to be a fun time.

Well, there have been some good games and memorable moments, but unfortunately it’s starting to look like the last two rounds might not be as exciting as the first two rounds.

Thanks in part to some bad breaks with injuries—Russell Westbrook, David Lee—it’s Grizzlies-Spurs and Heat-Pacers in the conference finals.

Nothing against those teams—they clearly earned it and played great ball—but those games won’t be nearly as fun to watch as fast-paced shootouts like OKC-Golden State or star-studded matchups like LeBron vs. Melo. Tough break for the fans.

Rants and Raves

Rants: NFL draft recaps are pointless. Why are analysts telling us who the winners and losers of the draft are? These rookies haven’t played a minute in the NFL yet. Tell me who won the draft in a couple of years when we see how the players turn out. … Why are the X-Games on for what feels like every week now? The concept of having multiple editions of the Games in different places had good intentions, but I like having the X-Games just once in the winter and once in the summer. Makes it more special.

Raves: It appears that the Kings are actually going to stay in Sacramento, welcome news for a city that loves their team and fought for it. … David Beckham announced his retirement. He goes out while still playing at a high level, which isn’t something many athletes are able to do. Good for him, though, for making that tough decision.

Winners and Losers

Winner: Tiger Woods. He’s back! HE’S BACK!!! Well, every time he has a good weekend we’re saying that. But winning the Players was a huge step for Tiger, once again the world’s No. 1 player. He’s confident now, and a major victory is
certainly in his sights this summer.

Loser: Kevin Durant. After a Sports Illustrated cover illustrated KD’s desire to no longer be just second best at everything, Kevin lost his partner-in-crime Westbrook to a knee injury and lost to Memphis in the Western
conference semifinals. Not even fourth best this time around for Kevin.

Benchwarmers
A new TBS show, tentatively called “Cheeseheads,” will focus on the lives of extreme Green Bay Packers fans, who eat, sleep and breathe Packer football. Bears fans may simply enjoy mocking the people on the show. … Tracy McGrady finally made an appearance in the Spurs’ blowout Game 5 win over Golden State last week. T-Mac! Playing basketball! He failed to score.

Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Michael Jeffries

A&F responds to protests over ‘image’ comments

By Kasey Carlson
Whitney Young

Recently, clothing companies have been getting into some hot water about the preferred image of their customers and employees.

Comments made by Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Michael Jeffries in a 2006 Salon magazine article about A&F’s clothes are made for “the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends”—and not the “not-so-cool kids”—have resurfaced and gone viral in the past few weeks.
Meanwhile, Wet Seal agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle a racial discrimination lawsuit. The teen retailer was accused of firing African-American employees, or denying them promotions, to present a blond-and-blue-eyed front in its stores.

Teens in the Chicago area have played a big part in fighting back against these companies and the influence they’re having on a generation by enforcing a narrow definition of what’s beautiful.

Cali Linstrom, a junior at Glenbard West, has worked with other students and filmmaker Darryl Roberts to organize protests in Chicago and Columbus, Ohio, where Abercrombie & Fitch has its headquarters.

Linstrom first became involved when she saw Jeffries’ statements posted on Facebook. Influenced by her own recovery from an eating disorder, she knew she had to do something about it.

“Before, I would hear something like that and I would just ignore it and not take it personally,” she said. “But after going through an eating disorder and seeing something like that, I knew I had to do something about it instead of just letting this one go.”

Last week, Jeffries issued a statement that while his 2006 comments were “taken out of context, I sincerely regret that my choice of words was interpreted in a manner that has caused offense.” He went on to defend his company’s policy of marketing to a particular segment of customers—calling A&F an “aspirational brand”—but added that the retailer is dedicated to “diversity and inclusion.”

In response, Linstrom and her fellow organizers canceled protests scheduled for Wednesday in Columbus. Instead, she said that she and other protesters were scheduled to meet with A&F executives there that same day.

Linstrom said, “We want to set up an anti-bullying campaign, and I could possibly be a spokesperson, and go around to high schools and middle schools and maybe even elementary schools and preach self-acceptance and self-love.

We’ve had assemblies about anti-bullying and treating people the way you want to be treated, but the core root of bullying is someone feeling bad about themselves and having to put someone else down to make themselves feel better,” she said.

Linstrom said she hopes A&F will support a campaign like this.

—The Los Angeles Times contributed.

READ MORE about this topic in Kasey Carlson’s opinion piece HERE.

Why News Matters explains how to know what news and information to believe, and what makes newsmakers and topics important. The Mash is just one of several members of Why News Matters, whose mission is to promote a better understanding of the media and help people be savvy consumers of news.

By Alex Nitkin
The Chicago Bureau

Two months after the announcement that Lyman Trumbull Elementary School in Andersonville—where his two sons are about to finish the first and fourth grade—will hold its last class this year, James Morgan still doesn’t know where his children will be going to school next year.

Following Chicago Public Schools’ March 20 announcement that it proposes to close the school, he got a notice in the mail saying his kids would be relocated to McCutcheon Elementary School, about 13 blocks away. A few weeks later, he got another notice saying they’d be going to Pierce Elementary, about a mile in the opposite direction.

“CPS just has no idea what’s going on here, and it’s scary,” said Morgan, Trumbull’s local school council chair. “They haven’t been helpful at all in this whole process, and they haven’t been listening to us.”

Morgan had already gotten a letter, this time from CPS chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett, informing him that the decision had been made “to close Trumbull … because it is underutilized, based on CPS Space Utilization Standards. Specifically, Trumbull had 389 students enrolled on the 20th day of attendance, but has the capacity to serve 720 students.”

The problem, according to Morgan, is that CPS’ definition of “capacity” entirely leaves out Trumbull’s 149 special needs students, including Morgan’s own son, who has ADHD.

“They’re using this cookie-cutter formula, which treats all students like general education students, but you just can’t have 30 autistic kids in a room with one teacher­—it’s totally crazy,” Morgan said. Though a 2012 utilization report lists Trumbull at 54 percent capacity, the school’s administration places that number at 88 percent. “We’ve made a lot of noise on this, and we’ve told them over and over that their utilization formula, which is the cornerstone of this whole plan, is flawed.”

Meanwhile, Morgan said, the district has sent three new special needs students to Trumbull, even though they’ll again be displaced when Trumbull closes.

“It’s insane—if you’re going to close us, why send us more special needs students?” he said. “When you move a student with special needs to a new school, you’re changing his whole environment, and that’s disruptive—they’re going to be thrown into new spaces with new tools and new teachers who don’t know how to deal with them.”

Morgan isn’t the only one feeling blindsided by the announcement of his school closing, which was one of several set to be confirmed by CPS officials on Wednesday. Briana Smith, a senior at Dyett High School, said she was shocked when she and her classmates were rounded up into an auditorium and told that their building would be closed by next year. Like Dyett, Crane Technical Prep is also set to be phased out within the next year.

“There are a lot of students here who haven’t finished school yet,” Smith said. “And I don’t know what’s going to happen to them if they have to go to school somewhere else.”

According to a Chicago Tribune story published in November, CPS figures showed that Dyett and Crane were just two of 19 high schools that were at least half empty during the 2011-12 school year. With utilization as the main criteria for determining school closings, CPS officials will look at many of these schools as they determine which should be shut down.

Other schools include (in order of most underutilized): Chicago Vocational, Mason, Tilden, New Millennium Health, Air Force Academy, Douglass, Phillips and Manley, to name a few.

Julie Woestehoff, executive director of Parents United for Responsible Education, said that CPS declined to close high schools this round because of safety issues—but added the district’s reasoning could change at any time. A looming $1 billion budget shortfall also influences any decision.

“You’re not going to resolve gang and turf issues in the high schools in one year, which will then allow them to close a bunch of high schools,” Woestehoff said. “That condition will continue unless they decide next year—which would not surprise me—that it’s no longer a problem.

“They change their rationale and their criteria every year anyway,” she said.

The danger posed by moving schools has incited an army of advocacy groups and parents like Morgan who have launched widespread protests based on the move’s potential to displace much of the city’s at-risk youth. The city, in response, has maintained that the move is a necessary measure to improve the physically outdated, and in some cases altogether dilapidated, condition of schools.

“Consolidating schools is the best way to make sure all of our city’s students get the resources they need to succeed in the classroom,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel in a statement in March.

CPS released a spending plan earlier this month in an attempt to chart out additional funding for “welcoming schools,” or schools that would be receiving displaced students.

But when it comes to getting hard data on which schools are most in need of maintenance and renovation, 2013 has seen a constant struggle between the school system and observers like the Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force.

“They’re going to funnel facility improvements to the receiving schools to try to make a bitter pill easier to swallow, but what people don’t understand is that this is a total shot in the dark,” said Jackie Leavy, a task force adviser.

Commissioned in 2009 by the Illinois General Assembly, the task force is a 15-member working panel made up of researchers, advocacy group representatives and state politicians of both parties charged with examining CPS policy on school maintenance and forming  recommendations. What they found was a massive uncovered network of schools in severe condition.

Out of 642 total public school buildings, its March 2011 report found that 92 needed a total of $750 million, or $137 per square foot, to bring them to a state of decent repair. Other schools only need an average of $51 per square foot to bring them to a similar standard.

In total, the city owes its schools just over $4 billion in deferred maintenance—which accounts for essential repairs like fixing defective boilers or removing asbestos, excluding renovations, according to CPS 2010 data. For Mary Filardo of the 21st Century School Fund, a research group based in Washington, D.C., the number represents a failure of Chicago schools.

“There’s a real disconnect in the education reform agenda with an understanding of how the quality of the school building affects the quality of its education—but it’s common sense that if you go to a wealthy school district, their schools aren’t falling down around their heads, because they’re demanding good facilities,” she said.

Alex Nitkin is a Northwestern University student and reporter for The Chicago Bureau, a partner of The Mash as part of Why News Matters’ news literacy initiative.

—-

FYI
6 things you need to know about closings

>> CPS insists that closures will pave the way for displaced students to attend better schools. But a University of Chicago Consortium on School Research study found that most displaced children ended up in schools that were not much better.

>> A hearing officer said Bowen High School shouldn’t be forced to co-locate with a new Noble Street Charter School.

>> The consortium found that, in previous rounds of closings, displaced students only reaped an academic benefit if they were sent to markedly better schools, defined as those in the top quartile. In this case, just six receiving schools out of 55 are in the top quartile of all CPS schools.

>> CPS officials counter that the money invested into the receiving schools will improve technology and other resources. The schools will be air-conditioned, with iPads, playgrounds and libraries. The district is also designating 19 schools as specialty schools, with International Baccalaureate, STEM and fine arts programs. This year, the new specialty schools will receive $250,000 to $360,000 in extra money to pay for positions and training.

>> CPS plans to hand over six schools to the Academy for Urban School Leadership for turnaround, which entails firing all or most of the staff, including the principal and the lunch ladies. For each turnaround, AUSL gets $300,000 in upfront costs, plus $420 per student for each student for at least five years. Current AUSL high schools include Collins, Orr and Phillips.

>> CPS officials say the district will save $437 million over the next decade by not having to repair or maintain the 50-some buildings they are shuttering. But only six of the closing schools have had recent assessments to determine their capital needs. In all of these cases, the updated assessments caused CPS to lower its savings estimate. In order for the district to save real money from closing schools, it would have sell off shuttered schools and lay off a lot of teachers, said Emily Dowdall, a senior associate for the Philadelphia Research Institute, which is part of the Pew Charitable Trust.

—Sarah Karp, Catalyst Chicago

—-

By the numbers

Catalyst Chicago and its sister publication, The Chicago Reporter, analyzed social and economic indicators in the areas within the attendance boundaries of the 54 schools recommended for closure. Here’s what they found.

$1 billion: The budget shortfall Chicago Public Schools is facing.

¼: Fewer than a quarter of Chicago residents younger than 25 live within the attendance boundaries of these schools, but 45 percent of youth homicides since 2008 occurred in these areas.

8%: Percentage of homeless students who attend closing schools. By comparison, 3 percent attend all other schools in the same neighborhoods.

59%: Percentage of schools with a higher-than-average population of special education students; 35 percent for all other schools in the area.

43%: Percentage of schools that have had two or more principals in five years, sometimes an indicator of a school’s academic futility; 24 percent for all other schools in the area.