A veteran Round Lake High School physical education teacher who claims to be a marijuana activist is due in court next month on drug-related and other charges, authorities said Thursday.

Round Lake Police Chief Michael Gillette said the instructor, Gina Epps, was on her lunch break Jan. 29 when she was pulled over on a traffic stop and later charged with possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia, expired registration, failure to notify the secretary of state of an address change and an equipment violation. He said all of the charges are misdemeanors.

Continue reading at the Daily Herald…

Facing mounting criticism for paying insiders with state construction grant money, the leader of the United Neighborhood Organization said Sunday the charter school network would at least temporarily stop doing business with a brother of UNO’s No. 2 executive.

UNO chief executive officer Juan Rangel said the group will no longer give work to d’Escoto Inc. — owned by a brother of Miguel d’Escoto, UNO’s senior vice president of operations — until after completing an internal review of its contracting practices.

Continue reading at Chicago Sun-Times…

Illinois State Board of Education raising the bar!

What was supposed to be a presentation on getting closer to finalizing the plan to restructure the schools in Round Lake Area District 116, felt more like sitting through a meeting of who’s to blame, Not Me! While Ass’t Superintendent Veronica Lake did her usual job of going through the hour-long Power Point restructuring presentation which pointed out the anticipated changes that will be required if the State goes along with the plan, there were handouts and discussion on the new testing requirements that will take place.

I had posted about this earlier that Round Lake Area students would be joining all other Illinois schools in being required to meet higher standards using new tests that would be administered several times a year to determine a students progress rather than only one test during the year. In the handout it stated:

Scores May Drop. These higher expectations will cause the number of students who meet and exceed standards to drop significantly. Some students who previously met or exceeded standards will instead be classified as needing improvement. However, these new expectations do not mean that our students know less than they did before or are less capable than they were in previous years.

Continue reading at Round Lake Area News.

This week is National School Choice Week, and although compared to other states, Illinois is considered a “limited choice” state, one of Illinois’ school choices is charter schools. Charter schools are public schools, and they’re open to any student who applies. In exchange for strict accountability to maintain high standards, charter schools are given freedom from many of the regulations that apply to other public schools, which allows for greater flexibility and innovation in the classroom.

Here’s 8 things you may not know about Illinois charter schools:

1. Illinois now has 55 charters operating 124 individual charter school campuses.
2. In Chicago alone there are 110 charter school campuses serving more than 46,000 students.
3. Statewide, charter enrollment now stands at more than 50,000 students, an all-time high.

See the full list at Illinois Review…

Round Lake Area School District 116 will be holding a very important school board meeting to vote on a final recommendation on the elementary school restructuring plan. The Board meeting will be heldMonday, January 28, 2013,7:00 pmat theRound Lake High School Theater.

I searched all over the schools website to find “promised” answers to parent’s questions thatBoard President Nanci Radfordstated at the last meeting would be posted there. About the only thing I could find was a sentence in their latest PowerPoint presentation, under a date of January 17th, that merely says “Administration facilitates a collaborative meeting with certified staff and parents to collect feedback (approx. 30 people)” There were many questions asked at the last meeting that remain unanswered as far as I can tell.

Continue reading at RoundLakeAreaNews.com

Well, well, what can we learn from the teacher strikes? The first thing that is evident is that, even though teachers have come to be hated by so many, they had better be feared as well. Why are they hated? Why must they be feared? I suppose both are for the very same reason. Teachers get paid with taxpayer money – federal, state, and local – and then give a hunk of that taxpayer money to the union in dues. The union then takes this money and gives the bulk of it to our politicians in the form of campaign contributions, election support, and who knows what else. The politicians, in turn, legislate in favor of teachers to enable them to take more and more money from the taxpayers that gave them the money to begin with.

By John Sullivan

This, I guess, is why so many people have come to hate those who take money from their own communities and use it to screw their own communities. Furthermore, since so much of these benefits are unfunded, they screw their children and grandchildren as well. Even worse, since teacher unions are “one-issue” bribers, they don’t care who they support as long as they give the teacher unions what they want.

Continue reading at Illinois Conservative Examiner….

Pension reform in Illinois got a rare legislative victory when the General Assembly moved to close loopholes that allowed labor leaders to land six-figure public pensions based on their much higher union salaries.

The measure, which deals with abuses exposed by the Tribune and WGN-TV, affects a small number of city workers on leaves of absence to work for their unions, and it passed with little dissent.

Continue reading at Chicago Tribune….