As always, Ben Joravsky is all a journalist should be: unbiased, impartial, fair. It is virtual wizardry that he can get the people on opposing sides to believe the article was written from their viewpoint. Mr. Joravsky has worked his magic in presenting a balanced report of almost mathematical precision in his article entitled “Hard Lessons” (Neighborhood News, April 26) about the local school council elections at Walt Disney Magnet School. That being said, there were but two points Mr. Joravsky and I discussed that did not get covered.
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The most significant of these concerns the statement that monies controlled by the LSC have been used exclusively on the school’s very real administrative needs. Nearly half our budget goes to plugging holes left by cuts that previous central administrations have imposed on nontraditional settings such as Disney. We have to “buy back” at least eight teachers we lost when the previous Board of Education chose to selectively hold our school to formulae they devised for neighborhood schools. Our Early Childhood Center continues to get the lion’s share of our funds because the board cannot find funds for pre-kindergarten programs except from federal government sources that require attendance by 100 percent “poverty” clients.
In order to give parents at the school a real choice, I ran a partial slate of three candidates that included only one parent (to fill the spot of a current LSC member whose child was graduating in June). Her name is Andrea Diaz and she is a new parent at Disney whose three-year-old child won a spot in the Early Childhood Center in last year’s lottery. She holds a degree in communications and journalism from Loyola and was an intern at Fox TV as well as having worked at other print and broadcast-media news agencies before becoming a full-time mom.
That way we won’t feel like we should offer a tour of the facility before they take office to run it.
