The 21-year-old wrapped up her last few days of classes, decorated her graduation cap in art class and went to her school’s prom — in the sparkly silver dress and matching shoes she picked out herself.

Then came the culmination of seven years of hard work.

After four years of high school and three years at Southside Occupational Academy, a public special education school in Chicago, she donned a royal blue gown and walked across the stage to receive her high school diploma. Her family, classmates and teachers cheered her on from the audience.

The tight-knit school community at Southside provided more than an education for Lockhart. It provided work training in housekeeping, a part-time paid job and plenty of chances to flex her basketball skills through Special Olympics competitions.

“I’m going to miss my friends, teachers, my principal, the security guards,” Lockhart said on a recent afternoon.

But she is also looking to the future and will enroll in a two-year program at Richard J. Daley College designed for students with disabilities while she continues to work three days a week in her paid custodial role with Hyatt. In the future, she hopes to continue volunteering with the Special Olympics organization and said she would love to work at the foundation.

For students with disabilities, graduation and life beyond school — including full-time employment and independent living — can seem out of reach, as traditional school models and curricula are not typically catered to students who need individual education plans.

In Chicago Public Schools, students in special education lag behind their peers in graduating from high school, with roughly 75% of students getting their diplomas in four years in 2023, compared with 85% of CPS students not in special education.

Under Illinois state law, students with significant cognitive disabilities are entitled to up to four years of continued education at what are known as “transitional schools” after their traditional four years in high school, up until they turn 22 years old.

But for special education graduates, transitional schools like Southside can provide a bridge from school to the workforce through specialized instruction, social-emotional learning and opportunities to complete paid work at Chicago companies throughout the school year.

Last month, around 80 students at Southside graduated with their high school diplomas and work experience.

“This is a space … to hone a student’s skills in whatever their time beyond us looks like,” said Jim McGuire, a special education teacher at Southside. “Whether it’s somebody who’s employed and will really be working towards full-time competitive employment, or some students where it’s most meaningful for them to continue to work on those skills to really contribute at home.”

Southside is one of four such specialized schools across the district, and between its two campuses in Englewood and Lower West Side, the school enrolls about 400 students. The district has another transitional school on the Near South Side, and two others are located on the North Side.

“We are sort of the South Side transition center for every neighborhood on the South Side,” McGuire said.

Southside students also take courses related to living independently. Topics range from learning how to use public transportation in the city to taking care of one’s own apartment.

Lockhart enrolled at Southside three years ago after attending South Shore High School, a large feeder school to Southside. She began at the Englewood campus for one year, before moving to the Lower West Side campus, called “the Hub” by the staff.

Students who move to the Hub are primarily focused on gaining real-life work experience at one of the school’s 12 work sites across the city, where students work in industries such as hospitality, parks and recreation and museums.

“We have all kinds of different opportunities and a lot of times our students really do show a strong skill set in those internships and oftentimes they’re offered opportunities to interview for permanent part time positions,” McGuire said.

In her second year, Lockhart began working part-time in housekeeping at a Hyatt Centric downtown once a week through Southside’s partnerships with the company. In addition, she worked in a paid custodial role for Hyatt, cleaning corporate office spaces twice a week outside of her school hours.

By her third year at Southside, she received a promotion at the company, she explained proudly, and performed her housekeeping duties independently without supervision.

“I really enjoy housekeeping. I clean the tables and do dishes,” Lockhart said of her job.

Southside also led her to pursue sports through the Special Olympics foundation in her extra time, and around the school, she is known for her layups in basketball games.

Her mother, Radisha Walker, said she was “overwhelmed with joy” at her daughter’s graduation ceremony.

“I’m just really proud of her,” Walker said. “She’s so goal driven and has the willpower that she’s not going to give up for anything. She’s going to keep trying.”

Southside students also take courses related to living independently. Topics range from learning how to use public transportation in the city to how to take care of your own apartment.

“We’re very focused on the individual and the path and what works best for them because the future is coming up quick,” said principal Jennifer Bollinger, who has led the school for 13 years. “Some students are here for four years, some are here for a year, so we try to adapt to whatever they need.”

Elijah Winston also found his way into the housekeeping program at Southside after graduating from Morgan Park High School, and has held a hospitality job the past two years.

Despite his success in the program, he has his heart set on breaking into another field: live entertainment.

Winston said he has been interested in musicals since he was a young boy and first saw “Hairspray.”

In the past year leading up to graduation, Winston, 21, auditioned twice for professional shows as an actor, including one at the Chicago Kids Company. He is also writing song lyrics and producing music he hopes to one day release.

“I’m trying to put my work out there,” he said.

When Winston received word of his first audition, two of his teachers at Southside helped him put together professional headshots prior to the audition.

“If you have a disability and you’re trying to find a job, it’s hard out there to find the right job,” Winston said.

At the school’s graduation ceremony, teachers leaned on the school’s two daily mantras as they sent the graduates off: Respect others and believe in yourself.

In McGuire’s class, 11 of his 13 students graduated this spring, including Lockhart and Winston.

After years of meetings with students and parents to craft the right education for each individual student, McGuire was emotional talking about his students’ future career aspirations, as each prepare to forge ahead on their own path.

“There’s just a lot of tears and just a collective feeling of ‘We did it,’” he said of seeing his students transition to their next stage of life. “This student is ready for the world in ways they couldn’t have anticipated.”

Regardless of their outcome, the elections will be historic, both expanding the seven-person board to 21 members and giving the public direct control over some of the members of the Chicago Board of Education. Since 1995, the mayor has elected all seven board members and has held essentially complete firing power over sitting members.

After months of debate, state legislators settled on the formal transition process back in March, with a hybrid elected model beginning this fall.

Despite the looming change, experts say there’s no concrete evidence demonstrating that elected school boards have different outcomes for students when compared with appointed boards.

“Whether it’s elections for the mayor or whether it’s for school boards, it’s really about different adult interests that up at the ballot box,” said Vladimir Kogan, a political science professor at Ohio State University who studies education policy. “Very little is usually fundamentally at the end of day about the kids and what’s good for student learning.”

However, research has shown that holding school board elections in on-cycle years — as Chicago will — can equate to more accountability for board members and result in a wider net of people voting for those who will control public schools.

And with recent heated debates — including between Mayor Brandon Johnson and Gov. J.B. Pritzker — over the future of neighborhood and selective enrollment schools, a busing shortage, equitable district funding and SROs in schools, outspoken critics of the current board could get their chance to shake up the status quo.

District breakdown

This fall, 10 of the 21 seats will be elected by the public, with the mayor continuing to elect the remaining 11 seats and appointing a board president. By 2027, all 21 members will be voted in. Those members will be elected by voters in 20 districts, who will also elect one president at-large.

The law signed by Pritzker in March maps out 10 districts for the November general election, in addition to the 20 areas for the 2026 elections.

That map includes seven majority-Black districts, six majority-Latino districts, five majority-white districts and two in which no group has a majority.

To search for your Chicago Elected School Board District: 1) type in an address; 2) look up a specific place name; 3) drop a marker anywhere on the map. To try a different address or clear your results select “Clear search location” at the top of the map.

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Candidates must file petitions to run between June 17 and June 24 after collecting at least 1,000 signatures. Members will serve two-year terms on the board.

Last month, an unofficial debate was hosted by CPS Parents for Buses, a parent group advocating for the return of busing for general education students. At that debate, which the group believes was the first gathering of candidates, candidates spoke on issues including transportation, funding and equity.

Participants included Jennifer Custer and Michelle Pierre in District 1; Kate Doyle, Daniel Steven Kleinman and Maggie Cullerton Hooper in District 2; Jason Dones in District 3; Kimberly Brown and Thomas Day in District 4; Jesus Ayala Jr. in District 7; Lanetta Thomas in District 9; and Adam Parrott-Sheffer and Che “Rhymefest” Smith in District 10.

At least 17 others have filed paperwork to raise campaign funds, including Ebony DeBerry and Debby Pope, District 2; Carlos Rivas, District 3; Andy Davis and Ellen Rosenfeld, District 4; Aaron “Jitu” Brown and Anthony Hargrove in District 5; Danielle Wallace, Andre Smith and Anusha Thotakura, District 6; Katie Marciniak, Eva A. Villalobos and Yesenia Lopez, District 7; Miquel Lewis and Therese Boyle in District 9; and the Rev. Robert Jones and Brian Alexander in District 10.

CPS Parents for Buses said all seven current board members were invited but did not attend the debate.

Tension between state and city officials

Mayor Johnson championed the move to an elected school board as part of his progressive campaign, with his former employer, Chicago Teachers Union, also heavily supporting the change.

Later, once the proposal hit the state legislature, Johnson pivoted to supporting a hybrid model. Legislators ultimately submitted to the ask.

Since then, tensions between city and state officials have played out in the public eye as state politicians expressed concerns over Johnson’s appointed school board’s decision to prioritize neighborhood schools.

Most recently, Pritzker expressed support for a moratorium that would prevent Chicago Public Schools from closing any schools or changing selective enrollment admissions practices until 2027, when the board is fully elected, but the future of the legislation is unclear.

Teacher unions can boost candidates’ chances

The largest force at the ballot box is an endorsement from the local teachers union, according to a 2023 national study that found candidates backed by teacher unions “overwhelmingly win” school board elections.

That could mean big wins for the powerful 30,000-member teachers union in Chicago.

“The reason that Brandon Johnson and the teachers union have long desired an elected school board is not just ‘Well, we’re in favor of democracy and empowering people to be able to choose their school board’ but because the teachers union’s favorite candidates tend to do exceptionally well in school board elections,” said Michael Hartney, research fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.

Hartney, who co-wrote the study on how teacher union endorsements can affect school board races, said such elections typically have some of the lowest voter turnout, averaging around 10% of registered voters.

“There’s this sort of paradox that people feel like having control over their local schools is democratic, but they don’t tend to show up and so who does show up? The teachers union,” Hartney said.

The average voter also put faith in teacher endorsements if they had positive experiences in school, regardless of their connection or involvement in the union.

“Ordinary voters, they trust teachers, they have really good feelings for teachers,” Hartney said. “Voters don’t tend to distinguish between the teachers union and the teachers themselves.”

How could turnout affect races?

Election officials said voter turnout in the March primary election was “pretty sleepy,” with less than 26% of registered voters showing out to a presidential primary with both candidates all but confirmed.

When voter turnout is low, voters are disproportionately older adults without kids, which can skew election results that affect public schools, Kogan said.

With Chicago’s school board elections occurring in either a presidential year and a mayoral election year, the Board of Education should in theory be more representative of what the average community member wants to prioritize in schools.

On-cycle elections can also hold elected school board members to higher standards, as more voters can equate to more pressure for elected officials to show that student outcomes have improved during their term.

“There’s some evidence … that when elections are on cycle, there’s more accountability for learning, and so there’s more incentives for elected officials to reprioritize student learning outcomes,” Kogan said.

Training  school board members

In addition to not receiving pay, school board members don’t receive training by the district. With the new frontier of schools rapidly approaching, local advocates launched the Academy for Local Leadership earlier this year to train a group of fellows on how school districts operate.

Run in collaboration with National Louis University, the academy follows a nine-month schedule leading up to the general election in November. Students learn what a school board does, discuss current big issues in education, and attend and debrief monthly Board of Education meetings.

Some experts question how much training could impact policy beliefs, many of which are inherently political.

“​​To the extent that a lot of the dysfunction is baked into the political centers, you can’t undo it by training. You have to change the incentives themselves. The training doesn’t really get the root cause of the problem,” Kogan said.

Those 10 years were plagued with stress about the cost, pressure to prioritize motherhood and long days without a babysitter. Some days, she brought Salvatore to class and asked a professor to watch him while she took notes.

After eight years, Romero, 38, enrolled in college again last fall — at the same time as her son.

This time, Romero enrolled at National Louis University with the hope of becoming a nursing clinical instructor. Salvatore, now 19, started his freshman year at the University of Illinois to study data science and geography.

The Romero family represents a rising number of parents attending college and earning degrees at the same time as their children through a local organization that fully funds college scholarships for two generations at once.

Scholarships for parents and their kids make longtime dreams a reality.

“I was a little nervous about going back to school, but it’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” said Lara Romero, who lives in the Pilsen neighborhood with her three younger children.

For the Romeros, navigating college simultaneously is an unusual experience.

They are similar to college roommates, texting each other good luck messages before exams. And similar to high school friends, Lara and Salvatore Romero visit each other as much as they can during the school year.

“I’ll tell him, ‘Hey, I have a test this morning.’ And he’ll be like ‘you got this Mom,’” Lara Romero said.

More than 130 parents have entered postsecondary education or workforce programs since 2022 through scholarships provided by Hope Chicago, a local nonprofit that supports two generations of families with scholarship money raised by private donors.

Launched in 2021, the scholarship program funds college tuition, room and board, food assistance and a stipend for any high school graduate of the five partner Chicago Public Schools.

About 1,200 CPS students have pursued advanced degrees through the program. When students enroll, their parent automatically becomes eligible for a scholarship to pursue a degree or certification at a partner higher education institution.

For April Kilgore-Wooden, a 50-year-old mother of five in Morgan Park, that meant her dream of teaching in a classroom could become a reality.

In 2021, Kilgore-Wooden was driving when she found out her daughter Lauryn’s high school was one of five Chicago Public Schools eligible for the scholarships. Immediately, she felt the opportunity was more than a free education — it could be life-changing.

“I heard the radio make the announcement that it was Morgan Park … and I was so overwhelmed just knowing that someone is investing in me and my child, first and second generation,” Kilgore-Wooden said. Out of her five children, Lauryn will be the first to obtain a degree.

When Lauryn, 18, enrolled as a first-year student at Loyola University Chicago last fall, her mother enrolled at National Louis University to study early childhood education.

Like her mother, Lauryn has known since high school her dream job: to pursue medical school and become a hematologist. As Lauryn spoke about her future profession, her mother jumped in that she had the goal “since she was 2 years old.”

With a year of school under her belt, April Kilgore-Wooden called her daughter her “accountability partner” on a recent afternoon, detailing how the two navigate degrees and going to college.

“With both of us trying to reach the same goal, it makes us both accountable,” April Kilgore-Wooden said. “It’s hard to keep pushing her when I haven’t obtained that goal, so that’s why I’m rushing and I’m hurrying up taking more classes and more classes trying to reach the finish line, so that I can obtain that goal.”

Hope Chicago CEO Janice Jackson said it is a “novel” approach because the model is the largest effort in the country to provide multigenerational scholarships.

Jackson, who was CEO of CPS from 2017 to 2021, said investments in two generations of families felt like the “missing piece” in addressing educational inequities and narrowing the wealth gap in historically underfunded school communities.

What separates the program is the focus on parents with children near adult age, rather than parents with infants, according to Jackson.

“Oftentimes when you think about two-generation models, it’s the parent with a young child, so like we’re gonna teach them how to read or cook together. But we don’t pay enough attention to the relationship that parents have with their children when their children are on the precipice of adulthood,” Jackson said.

A study by the Urban Institute found that mothers in the United States who returned to school and completed a degree earn on average three times more and have better mental health than their counterparts who did not return to school.

The research also found that their biological children were more likely to complete high school, have gains in verbal and reading scores and were about twice as likely to enroll in college, regardless of the child’s age.

“The bottom line is that it yields economic payoff for the entire family,” said Theresa Anderson, author of the study and principal research associate at the Washington, D.C.-based institute.

Data on parents with kids — or parent students — is limited, as research on the demographic did not gain traction until around 2010, Anderson said. Previous research in the 1980s and 1990s was primarily focused on parenting skills and ways to bring in income, not on obtaining postsecondary education, Anderson added.

In 2016, roughly 21% of undergraduate students in Illinois had dependent children, according to the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. It’s unclear what age their children were.

It wasn’t until 2021 that Illinois became the second state in the country to require schools to record parenting status for its students.

Since then, increased state legislation has shown that parent students — who are more likely to be women and students of color — are now a target priority group for education systems, Anderson said.

About 13% of students attending postsecondary school in the United States either part or full time in 2021 were age 35 years or older, according to data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics. But researchers predicted that number to grow by another 100,000 students by 2024.

When selecting high schools for the program, Hope Chicago identified district schools where the “need was the greatest,” Jackson said. Those schools tended to have low enrollment trends and a lack of financial and wraparound services for students after graduation.

The program partners with schools on the West and South sides of Chicago that have predominantly Black and Latino student populations.The five schools are Morgan Park High School; Benito Juárez Community Academy in Pilsen; Al Raby School for Community and Environment in East Garfield Park; Noble Johnson College Prep in Englewood; and Farragut Career Academy in Little Village.

Through the scholarship, students can attend their choice of more than two dozen schools, including any public school in Illinois and a handful of private schools. Meanwhile, parents have the option of several two- and four-year degree programs, vocational programs, or job training classes, also in the Chicago area or Illinois.

For many parents in Chicago on scholarship, returning to school meant returning to a classroom for the first time since high school while continuing to work the same jobs they built careers in.

Kilgore-Wooden, who has dyslexia, recalled a point in her first year when she considered quitting her teaching program as the stress of navigating college courses and professors, coupled with her learning disability and her main job, almost made her quit the program.

“It wasn’t easy in the beginning and I actually was very frustrated,” she said. “Especially at my age because you haven’t been like educated in a while so you’re kind of like OK, what does any of this mean?”

Now, with the start of her student teaching on the horizon, Kilgore-Wooden plans to graduate in eight months and hopes to work in a CPS school one day soon teaching the district’s youngest children.

“Becoming a teacher was my childhood dream,” Kilgore-Wooden said. “And now I can look forward to becoming an educator.”

Other parents are taking time in retirement to pursue a completely new career path.

Shelia Moore, 56, of Morgan Park, completed a lengthy career in the utilities industry before recently retiring. But the mother of seven children said she now has aspirations to enter a new phase of life and one day pilot an airplane.

Her daughter Dominique, 21, studies biology in her third year at Chicago State University and plans to attend medical school, while Sheila Moore will earn a certificate in aviation mechanics from Olive-Harvey College.

As her mother spoke about her aspirations to one day earn her pilot’s license and fly a plane, Dominique smiled next to her.

“I would tell other parents that it’s never too late,” Shelia Moore said. “Start out small and then by the time their children will be growing up, they’ll be able to go to college right there with them.”

Dominique chimed in with support: “It’s never too late.”

Despite having no family or friends in the city, she had a crew of DePaul community members who met her at the airport, welcoming her to Chicago.

Since that first day in the city, she has assumed the role of mentor to younger students from around the world pursuing higher education.

“You never walk alone,” Farkiwala said of being an international student at DePaul. “You walk with support from all of the teachers and the community.”

Farkiwala is one of more than 1 million international students who enrolled in undergraduate or graduate programs during the 2022-23 school year, when international enrollment in the United States jumped 11.5%, according to federal data published in November. Roughly 55,000 international students attended colleges in Illinois in the 2022-23 academic year, ranking the state fifth in the nation for international enrollment.

The uptick in international students has been especially spurred by students from India, which became the most populous country in the world in April 2023.

At DePaul, administrators pride themselves on being a school with a large international student community. The number of international students doubled — even as overall enrollment at the university is down.

DePaul’s administration attributed the increase to a jump in Indian students, as more Indian families seek out higher education, in addition to targeted marketing and admissions strategies by the school.

“We’ve expanded strategic partnerships in some of the target countries and regions that we’re looking to expand our international student enrollments from,” said Kari Costello, DePaul’s assistant vice president for international admission and recruitment.

To attract international students, DePaul also offers academic scholarships — which can be a rare opportunity for those students.

“We’re one of the few institutions that offers international student scholarships. A lot of institutions don’t do that,” Costello said.

These enrollment statistics could be viewed simply as a recovery from the pandemic, which created pent-up demand for both recent high school graduates and students who delayed their studies, said Rajika Bhandari, who founded a New York City-based international education consulting firm in 2019 focused on students studying in the United States and India.

However, the surge is also the result of two larger trends.

Bhandari said growing youth populations in South Asian and African countries with an appetite for higher education also contribute. In addition, recent visa restrictions in other countries have inversely led to more students applying to American colleges.

Indian students spur growth

In response to changing policies in education and a population boom, U.S. leaders in higher education circles are investing time and resources to attract more prospective students from India.

Last month, a delegation of 31 higher education advocates from 17 institutions, including two representatives from DePaul, traveled to cities across the South Asian country on a trip with the Institute for International Education, a century-old foundation that facilitates international programs.

Indian government officials estimate that over the next 25 years an additional 50 million seats in higher education will be needed for the college-aged population, according to Sarah Ilchman, co-president of the Institute of International Education.

“That’s a daunting number, and so clearly, countries like the United States will be an important partner with this baby boom,” Ilchman said.

The U.S. is particularly well situated for this boom, according to Ilchman. It has arguably the most diverse higher education system in the world, with “different types of institutions — large, small, urban, rural, public, private,” she said.

Students are more likely to pay for an American education at a well-known school, Ilchman said. “Students are looking for a brand name and studying in the U.S. and attending an American institution is a brand name around the world that people are eager to compete for, and quite frankly, pay for,” Ilchman said.

For international students looking to study abroad, safety, career opportunities and visa availability tend to be the top considerations, Bhandari said.

Safety considerations include whether students are afraid of being targeted for their race or ethnicity.  become victims of a hate crime.”] Those considerations are especially true for native Indian students.

For instance, in 2017, an Indian student was shot and killed while working at a bar in Kansas. International student enrollment in Kansas subsequently declined in the years following his death, Bhandari said. The gunman later pleaded guilty to hate crime charges.

Professional opportunities also heavily influence international students’ educational choices. But challenges can remain on the path to postgraduate work, Bhandari said

For Farkiwala, future career opportunities remain stalled as she awaits word of her eligibility for a work visa. As an undergraduate, she completed an internship with Deloitte through a benefit with her international student visa that allows her to work while in college.

“We’re fortunate that so many students are interested in coming here to study, but the challenges that really remain … is what I call a broken pathway between higher education and immigration,” Bhandari said. “If they want to stay on and work, that pathway is incredibly difficult and challenging for most students.”

Finding community miles from home

Beemnet Desta had three priorities when looking at American colleges: location, program and diversity.

She remembers applying to more colleges than she could keep track of before eventually choosing DePaul, she said, because it had a strong computing program and was one of the more diverse schools she considered. And Desta liked the campus in the heart of Chicago, even though it was miles from her home in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Now, as a graduate student, Desta organizes opportunities for students to meet each other — and nearly every international student at DePaul knows her name.

On a frosty afternoon in January, almost 100 international students gathered in a creative “makerspace” classroom at DePaul’s downtown Loop campus. Inside, groups huddled around various stations to make tote bags, buttons and T-shirts, complete with stickers of Chicago landmarks. As students crafted, loud conversations filled the room.

“Being an international student can be hard because your family isn’t here, and you’re trying to make new friends, but there could be cultural differences, language barriers, so when they’re here, they’re trying to get outside their comfort zone,” said Desta, a data science graduate student who plans the weekly international student events through Global DePaul, a student organization.

Campuses are working to be as inclusive as possible, Bhandari said, but not everything is in the control of college students or administrators.

“It’s more what might be happening off campus,” Bhandari said of possible tension with more international students attending higher education institutions in the United States. “An international student visa is not enough armor to protect someone if they’re out on the streets and become a victim of a hate crime.”

Weekly events to bring international students together, which Desta said regularly have good attendance, range from visiting local restaurants with international cuisines to exploring neighborhoods across Chicago.

Cultural centers and ethnic student associations also serve as support systems for international student populations.

For Carlos Daniel Guerrero Gaspar, a DePaul sophomore from Mexico City studying economic data analytics, the Latino Cultural Center serves as a cornerstone of his identity, from when he attends class to when he gives tours encouraging others to attend the university.

“That’s how I keep in touch with my identity and meet other people who come from similar backgrounds as me,” he said.

aguffey@chicagotribune.com

After setting up more than a dozen tents in the Main Quadrangle on the Hyde Park campus, U. of C. protesters led an hourlong rally dissenting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza as the death toll in the besieged area climbs to more than 34,000 people since Oct. 7.

The rally, which also called on U. of C. to end partnerships with Israeli universities and commit to transparency, drew nearly 500 people erupting in chants.

U. of C. senior Youssef Hasweh, who is Palestinian, led the crowd in a run of “Paul, Paul what do you know? Where does all our money go?”

Students said the chant references university President Paul Alivisatos’ refusal to meet with students on the school’s investments, which they’ve been demanding since last fall.

In a statement late Monday afternoon, Alivisatos said the university will only intervene when and if the protests block the learning or expression of others or if the demonstrations “substantially disrupts the functioning or safety of the University.”

“I believe the protesters should also consider that an encampment, with all the etymological connections of the word to military origins, is a way of using force of a kind rather than reason to persuade others,” Alivisatos said. “For a short period of time, however, the impact of a modest encampment does not differ so much from a conventional rally or march. Given the importance of the expressive rights of our students, we may allow an encampment to remain for a short time despite the obvious violations of policy—but those violating university policy should expect to face disciplinary consequences.”

In a follow-up statement, Michele Rasmussen, dean of students at U. of C., said setting up tents on the Quad or erecting other structures and obstructions without prior approval is a violation of university policy and will result in disciplinary action.

“We are monitoring the situation closely. The individuals involved are on notice that the university is prepared to take further action in the event of continued violations of our time, place, and manner policies governing protests, threats to public safety, disruption of operations or academic activities, or destruction of property,” Rasmussen said.

Hasweh said the encampment was designed to be “a university within a university” complete with a welcome tent, a library consisting of a shelf filled with books and tables with food and water. Inside the camp, several students worked in groups on laptops.

Student organizers chose to begin the demonstration two days early, Hasweh said, after a right-leaning media outlet on campus leaked their plans to occupy buildings for a peaceful sit-in.

Protest encampments have popped up in the past week at nearly two dozen college campuses across the country, including Harvard, Brown, the University of Michigan and University of Texas at Austin. New York’s Columbia University became the epicenter of the large, and at times violent, movement in recent days, as demonstrators clashed with police and administrators announced classes on the main campus would be held remotely for the rest of the semester.

Last week, the Palestinian-led movement sparked protests at several Chicago-area universities and colleges, including at Northwestern University where an agreement between students and administration was reached Monday afternoon.

Activists hug after Northwestern officials announced Monday that they have reached an agreement with students and faculty protesting against Israel-Hamas war, April 29, 2024, in Evanston. The deal comes five days after demonstrators established an encampment in Deering Meadow, a popular common area on the Evanston campus. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)Northwestern University officials said in an email that the move allows demonstrations to continue on campus through June 1 but requires the immediate removal of tents and sound systems, as well as a commitment that all protesters will adhere to university policies.

Students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago and Roosevelt University also marched Friday in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

At an unrelated event Monday, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said his team has been in touch with universities across Illinois as campus protests evolve.

“It is obviously very important to me that we keep order — it is also important to me that we protect people’s right to protest and their First Amendment rights,” Pritzker said. “So we’re monitoring it very closely. Again, it shouldn’t interfere with people’s ability to go to class, to take their exams, which they’re in now in many places … but if people are going to protest, they should protest in a peaceable and peaceful fashion, allowing the university to operate as it should as an academic institution for those who are paying tuition and attending.”

School administrators nationwide are also cracking down on pro-Palestinian demonstrators with arrests and canceled classes. In an email, members of UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP), said the scale of the repression of students’ freedom of speech across the country is incomparable to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and across the occupied Palestinian territories.

The relationship between student activists at U. of C. and the university has been tense since November, when 26 students were arrested by campus police for refusing to leave the admissions building on campus during a sit-in. Charges for criminal trespassing were later dropped but the students still face disciplinary hearings, less than two months from graduation.

Further sparking the pro-Palestinian movement on campus was a meeting between Alivisatos and Yinam Cohen, consul general of Israel to the Midwest, in February. In a post on X, Cohen said the purpose of the meeting was “to further enhance the partnership between (the University of Chicago) and Israeli research institutions and to make sure that every Jewish or Israeli student feels safe on campus.”

Hasweh, who was among the students arrested in the fall, said he simply “wants to be noticed” by university administrators through the encampment.

“It’s insane to feel you’re invisible but know that you’re not,” he said, adding that U. of C. is choosing not to engage with pro-Palestinian students. “What power can you do with that? And that’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

In attendance at the encampment Monday was longtime Chicago revolutionary organizer Frank Chapman, who serves as the educational director and field secretary at the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.

Chapman, who began organizing in 1961, sat in a red chair at the center of the rally. He leaned in, focusing on the speeches made by student organizers, before one of them handed him the microphone.

“I’m tired but I ain’t tired of fighting,” Chapman said. “When it comes to the course of liberation in Palestine, I am representing the entire oppressed Black community.”

Mike Miccioli, a second-year physics doctoral candidate and member of UChicago STEM for Palestine, said amid student protests on college campuses, he wants to recenter the conversation on Gaza.

“The reason we are here is to end the genocide,” he said. “And I think it’s energized a lot of people.”

As the encampment grew into the afternoon, a few counterprotesters walked through the crowd to “agitate” people, organizers said. The overarching policy is to not engage, said third-year student Anuj who declined to give his last name out of privacy concerns.

“If they want to make a scene we can’t stop them,” he said. “We know why we’re here.”

Chicago Tribune’s Olivia Olander contributed. 

At Northwestern University’s Evanston campus, demonstrations continued for a second day at Deering Meadow, a popular common area on campus. More than 40 tents covered the encampment — three times as many as Thursday — as some students studied, worked on laptops and read books.

Meanwhile, student organizers from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College and Roosevelt University staged a walkout in solidarity with Gaza downtown. And at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, students marched on the main quad. No protesters were arrested at any of the demonstrations, as of Friday evening.

Protest encampments have popped up at dozens of college campuses across the U.S. and Canada, including Loyola University in Rogers Park, after beginning at New York’s Columbia University last week. Some schools have negotiated with students, while others called in law enforcement to douse demonstrations, leading to mass arrests and, at times, violent clashes with police.

As the death toll mounts in the war in Gaza — more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Health Ministry — and the humanitarian crisis worsens, students have demanded schools cut financial ties to Israel.

Israel launched its war in Gaza after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, where the group killed some 1,200 people and took 250 hostages.

Northwestern students want ‘all eyes on Gaza’

Students and activists associated with the Northwestern Divestment Coalition started the “Northwestern Liberation Zone” Thursday morning, taping signs to the fence surrounding the protest with messages such as “All eyes on Gaza.” Many spent the night in tents.

No citations had been issued as of Friday afternoon, a campus spokesperson said. No classes were canceled Friday either.

As rain began to fall Friday afternoon, students protected tents with tarps and directed a steady flow of donated supplies, from chips and cookies to prayer mats and pizza. Around half the crowd lined up for afternoon prayers led by Palestinian civil rights activist and Muslim scholar Imam Omar Suleiman, as two campus police cars sat nearby.

“Don’t move. Don’t move from the side of truth. Don’t move from the side of justice,” he said before leading the crowd in prayers. “Plant our feet firm and put in our hearts what is necessary to be fortified so that we are never intimidated, never scared, never broken.”

Some Jewish students say the protests have made them afraid to set foot on campus. Northwestern Hillel, the university’s Jewish center, said the encampment reflected “a disturbing and quickly escalating trend of antisemitic rhetoric and actions both nationally and on our own campus.”

Senior administrators met with demonstrators Thursday evening to “ensure the safety of members of the Northwestern community while also providing a space for free expression,” a university spokesperson told the Tribune. The university told students they could continue to assemble as long as they remove tents and stop using bullhorns and speakers, an offer they declined, a statement posted to the school’s website said.

First-year student Alexandra Hoffmann said she heard that conversations about disclosing the university’s investments were “not very productive.” She added that a core group of protesters were committed to staying overnight at the camp while other supporters came and went.

“A lot of people were very upset so that’s adding fuel to the fire,” Hoffmann said.

Universities, including Northwestern, use endowments invested in companies, private equity and hedge funds to pay for things such as research and scholarships. Northwestern’s endowment fund is invested in a “widely diversified pool of assets,” according to its website. Students are pushing the school to drop any investments in companies with ties to Israel and weapons manufacturers. Private institutions such as Northwestern aren’t required to provide detailed financial information.

Northwestern administrators abruptly changed a campus policy Thursday morning to ban tents and other temporary structures in common areas, saying students violating the policy risked suspension, expulsion or criminal charges, according to a statement on the school website.

There was a brief encounter Thursday morning between protesters and cops, who warned students to take down tents or face citations. But they eventually left to monitor the protest from nearby buildings.

At a protest Thursday afternoon, roughly four dozen Loyola students called on the school to reinstate a student representative to its board of trustees so students can access the school’s financial portfolios and understand whether it has invested money with companies that profit from war. Campus security watched the sit-in from a distance, but did not attempt to stop it.

Walkouts at three schools

Hundreds of students from the School of the Art Institute, Columbia and Roosevelt walked out of classes Friday afternoon, gathering in Millennium Park to express support for Palestine and other campus demonstrations.

As rain came down, the crowd clutched handmade signs and posters beside the Bean. Organizers chanted through a microphone and raised a large banner on the steps that said “Free Palestine” in red letters.

The Tribune did not see counterprotesters on the scene, but dozens of police officers watched from afar on North Michigan Avenue. A Chicago police spokesperson said there were no arrests. All three schools did not respond to requests for comment.

Jordan Daniels, a recent Art Institute graduate, was dripping wet from hours in the rain. The student encampments across the Chicago inspired her,, she said.

“It’s very exciting to see that young people are stirring things up,” Daniels said. An organizer added that many attendees planned to join the Northwestern encampment after the protest.

SAIC students Felix Severino, 26, and Julia Fetters, 22, stood toward the front of the crowd, cheering the speakers.

“The genocide has been happening for way too long. It shouldn’t have been happening in the first place,” Fetters said. “Just seeing three schools in Chicago get together, it’s like, ‘Hell yeah, we’re gonna make some noise.’”

U. of C. students call for a ‘free Palestine’

Meanwhile Friday afternoon, more than 100 students and activists marched in the rain on the University of Chicago’s main quad, shouting “Free, free Palestine” and “Up up with liberation! Down with the occupation.”

Organizers spoke about the importance of divesting university funds from institutions with ties to Israel. The protest lasted about two hours, ending around 4 p.m. A U. of C. spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Students said the movement for Palestinian liberation on campus has grown in the past six months with 13 campus organizations asking for divestment and full transparency on endowments.

“I am a marginalized student,” said Alexis Paredes, a senior at U. of C. “On a campus in which so much of our money goes to investing in weapons manufacturing. … I feel like it’s not in my heart to be complicit.”

The Associated Press contributed.

Northwestern President Michael Schill informed students of the policy change in an email sent just after 9 a.m. By that time, a small encampment had been erected in Deering Meadow, a popular common area on the Evanston campus.

“The goal of this addendum is to balance the right to peacefully demonstrate with our goal to protect our community, to avoid disruptions to instruction and to ensure University operations can continue unabated,” Schill said in the email.

Students in violation of the new policy risk suspension, expulsion or criminal charges, according to a statement posted on the university’s website.

School administrators, however, have done very little to enforce the rule since the announcement. Campus officials spent much of Thursday negotiating with the demonstrators, hammering out guidelines that would allow for free speech while preventing the kind of protests that have roiled universities across the country.

“The University is in active discussions with the demonstrators to ensure the safety of members of the Northwestern community while also providing a space for free expression,” Jon Yates, vice president for global marketing and communications at Northwestern University, said in an email to the Tribune.

The outcome of negotiations between the students and staff was unclear Thursday evening.

Protest encampments have popped up in the past week at nearly two dozen college campuses across the country, including Harvard, Brown, the University of Michigan and the University of Texas at Austin. New York’s Columbia University became the epicenter of the large, and at times violent, movement in recent days, as demonstrators clashed with police and administrators announced classes on the main campus would be held remotely for the rest of the semester.

Similar turmoil threatened to envelop Northwestern early Thursday morning as campus law enforcement officials warned students to take down their tents or be cited for breaking school policy. At one point, demonstrators formed a human chain to prevent police officers from entering the encampment.

According to students, police tried to disperse the crowd by saying they needed a “reservation” to demonstrate on the quad and use a bullhorn, as outlined in the new policy.

Miriam Adesiji, a junior at Northwestern from Columbus, Ohio, said she woke up at 7 a.m. to frantic texts from her friends who were worried about police infringing on the protest. She said she didn’t know how the rest of the day was going to go.

“It’s a scary time. There’s a lot of unknown,” she said.

As a Black student, she said she believed it was important to show up to support.

“We would not be on this campus without protests just like this,” she said.

Several tents were removed from Deering Meadow before 9 a.m., according to Schill’s email. Students, however, erected them again without recourse.

No citations had been issued as of Thursday afternoon, a campus spokesman said. Police also had left the meadow, opting instead to monitor the protest from nearby buildings.

Within a few hours of the president’s email, more than a dozen flimsy camping tents stood in the middle of the university’s flagship campus in Evanston. A canopy sat in the middle, with a table full of food under it and several grills nearby.

“Northwestern students, faculty and staff are putting their bodies, education and jobs on the line to stand with the Palestinian people,” organizers wrote in a statement circulated before the protest.

Students linked arms to form a barricade around the tents as uniformed Northwestern University police officers stood a few yards back, watching students chant “Free, free, Palestine” and other pro-Palestinian messages.

Outside a fence separating the encampment from the sidewalk, sophomore Jeremy Berkun stopped with two of his friends to watch the scene.

Berkun, a Jewish student, said he was disappointed in the dialogue on campus between students.

“It’s clear that the university and the student body is very, very against Israel at the moment,” he said. “And I just wish that there was a little bit more dialogue amongst the Jewish students here who feel very connected to that land and to the nation that has kept us safe.”

Behind Berkun, a rabbi consoled a girl in tears.

In a statement shared on social media, Northwestern Hillel, the university’s Jewish center, said the encampment reflected “a disturbing and quickly escalating trend of anti-semitic rhetoric and actions both nationally and on our own campus.”

The university’s South Asian Student Association said on Instagram the group was moving the location of a Saturday Holi celebration, originally scheduled to be held on Deering Meadow, to support the encampment protest.

Northwestern demonstrators also are asking the university administration to publicly disclose where the university invests its money and to withdraw its money from any funds profiting off of the war. As a private institution, the university is not required to provide detailed financial statements.

“We pay $100,000 here to go here and that’s $100,000 that could be going straight to God knows where and the university does not disclose that information, which is just unacceptable,” said a Northwestern undergraduate student, who was a lead organizer for Thursday’s protest. She declined to disclose her name to the Tribune for fear of retribution from the university.

Loyola University students made similar transparency demands at a protest Thursday afternoon at the Rogers Park campus, as roughly four dozen demonstrators sat scattered across the college’s main lawn. Campus security watched the sit-in from a distance, but did not attempt to stop it.

The protesters, among other things, called on Loyola to reinstate a student representative to its board of trustees so students can access the school’s financial portfolios and understand whether it has invested money with companies that profit from war.

Bree Sorensen, a social work doctoral candidate, said she does not spend much time on campus at Loyola, but she works with college students, who inspired her to support the pro-Palestine gathering.

“I’m trying to hold myself accountable,” Sorensen, 36, said of joining the sit-in with her intern from her practice.

The Northwestern encampment was mostly peaceful after police backed up, allowing the tents to stay on the quad. The gathering was subdued enough throughout the afternoon for some students to take naps in the tents as demonstrators beat snare drums and waved Palestinian flags.

Paper signs were taped to the fence surrounding the protest.

“Free Gaza Liberated Zone,” read one. “All eyes on Gaza,” read another.

By Thursday evening, the crowd had swelled by a few hundred. The encampment was marked by the Muslim call to prayer, traffic noise, laughter, birdsong and a burst of applause as a mariachi band joined the crowd.

Less than 30 minutes later, protestors surrounded at least one counter-protester who had been shouting at the group and began chanting, “Racists, go home,” forming a human wall around them as the mariachi performance continued in the background.

As night fell and more demonstrators arrived on the lawn, they gathered on blankets and erected more tents while speakers addressed the crowd and people lined up for dinner.

One organizer sang the four questions, traditionally recited by the youngest child during the Jewish holiday of Passover, which began Monday night. A small table containing a seder plate and candlesticks stood near the front of the protest gathering.

The union’s raise request also aims to improve teacher retention and recruitment in Chicago Public Schools.

The 30,000-member teachers union publicly launched its bargaining efforts earlier this week, calling proposals for their four-year contract renewal with CPS the “most ambitious” yet.

“It’s not just our economic proposals,” CTU President Stacy Davis Gates said at a Tuesday morning news conference on bargaining efforts.

The CTU has yet to specify all demands included in contract proposals. But at the forefront of priorities is paying the union’s workforce of predominantly women “their fair share” and to raise the floor for paraprofessionals such as clerks and teacher assistants who are the lowest wage earners in the union, Davis Gates said Tuesday.

The union has also promised to extend negotiations “beyond economic proposals.”

“We are asking for substantial amounts of investment into our school community,” added Davis Gates, flanked by educators who advocated for expanding bilingual, sports, fine arts and restorative justice programming and Sustainable Community Schools.

To bring the public to the table in finding solutions, CTU said it sent a request to CPS last Friday to live-stream bargaining sessions. The district has not responded to the request.

CPS has said it wants to learn more about the union’s request and that the district “looks forward to negotiating a fair contract that balances the interests of the hard-working educators with our budget constraints” when negotiations commence.

The moratorium extension is included in a bill sponsored by state Rep. Margaret Croke that was initially aimed primarily at protecting selective enrollment schools, which school choice advocates feel are threatened after Johnson’s school board late last year announced its intent to focus on neighborhood schools in a forthcoming five-year plan. The legislation also would prohibit any admission changes for selective enrollment schools until 2027.

Croke subsequently filed an amendment that would apply the moratorium to all of Chicago Public Schools. The House passed the bill late Thursday in a 92-8 vote, with all eight no votes from Democrats. The bill now goes to the Senate.

Chicago Public Schools launches a new, ‘more equitable’ funding model

During the floor debate, Croke said the new legislation is necessary because there will only be a hybrid board in place next year instead of a fully elected board.

“This bill is about democracy and I understand that democracy is not convenient, but … I do not believe that means we circumvent it,” Croke said.

Earlier, school board Vice President Elizabeth Todd-Breland voiced opposition to Croke’s initial legislation and said the board remains fully committed to funding selective enrollment schools.

“This bill in fact is a proposed remedy to a problem that actually does not exist,” Todd-Breland said at Wednesday’s board meeting.

“In restricting the board’s ability to make decisions about admissions and enrollment the bill as written negatively impacts CPS students across the entire district. Without the ability to reexamine selective admissions and attendance policies, selective schools may become more and more racially and economically segregated and create barriers to access for the majority of CPS students,” Todd-Breland said.

A moratorium on closing Chicago Public Schools buildings is set to expire in January under the 2021 state law creating an elected school board. But after extensive haggling on how to implement an elected board, Pritzker last month signed a measure that creates a board composed of 10 elected members and 11 others, including the board president, appointed by Johnson beginning in January 2025. A fully elected 21-member board won’t be in place until January 2027.

Given that, Pritzker said extending the moratorium is the right call “so that decisions can be made by people who are representative of the people of Chicago.”

“I think it makes sense as we wait for the elections for the elected school board in Chicago, and then the elected school board will be able to make the decisions about what the future of those (selective enrollment) schools is,” Pritzker said during an unrelated event in Decatur. “But I think making sure that we don’t make major changes between now and then with the appointed board when the intention is to have (a fully) elected board makes perfect sense and I think Representative Croke has made the right decision to include all public schools, including the selective enrollment ones.”

School closings have been a flashpoint in Chicago ever since dozens of buildings were shut down under Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration in the early 2010s.

The five-year plan expected to be taken up by the Chicago school board later this year will guide investments in Chicago Public Schools as districts across the country face a fiscal cliff. Federal COVID-19 emergency relief funds that buoyed CPS in recent years will be expiring in September and the district faces a budget shortfall of at least $391 million next school year.

The sense of scarcity — and misinformation that selective enrollment schools might close as a result of the plan — prompted selective enrollment school parents and proponents to decry the board’s stated goals of transitioning from policies that “drive student enrollment away from neighborhood schools” and ensuring that neighborhood schools are “fully-resourced.”

CPS officials have said repeatedly since December that they have no plans to close selective enrollment or magnet schools. And, in launching the 2024-25 budget, CEO Pedro Martinez told the Tribune that the new approach to funding — which guarantees every school a minimum number and ratio of support staff and teachers in core subjects like reading and math, as well as in arts and physical education — protects the robustness of the city’s “strongest schools,” while ensuring those in high-poverty areas aren’t starved of resources.

Central office expenses, rather than any school-level costs, are being cut to make the “much more equitable, much more transparent” funding strategy possible, Martinez said.

With no plans on the horizon to close selective enrollment schools, charter schools may stand to gain the most protection if a moratorium covering all schools is extended through early 2027.

CPS’ efforts last year to revoke the charter of the troubled Urban Prep charter school network following allegations of financial mismanagement and sexual misconduct by a former administrator were rebuffed by a Cook County judge, who ruled CPS would be violating the existing moratorium on school closures through 2025 if it absorbed Urban Prep’s two campuses as district-run schools.

And in renewing contracts with 49 charter schools this year, CPS has begun subjecting charters to more scrutiny, extending renewal terms as short as a year when audits show shortcomings in charter schools’ academic and financial performance and supports and services provided to diverse and English language learners.

Croke, a Democrat from Chicago’s North Side, said she was aware CPS officials opposed expanding the moratorium to include all schools.

“They didn’t go into explanations of why they didn’t want that,” she said. “I assume it’s because there’s a worry about budget impact.”

“When I was speaking with my colleagues, we had this conversation about how I’m really not trying to necessarily say selective enrollment is perfect or how we’re trying to preserve selective enrollment for the rest of time as it is now,” Croke said. “This is about democracy. This is about waiting until we have a fully elected school board before we make significant changes to the largest school district in the state.”

The moratorium extension in Croke’s bill was approved without opposition earlier this week in the House Executive Committee.

The Chicago Teachers Union did not provide its position on an expanded moratorium, instead pointing to comments CTU President Stacy Davis Gates made earlier Thursday at an unrelated student roundtable at Collins High School, a neighborhood school.

Davis Gates said that Croke “seems to be unaware that her bill hurts families and neighborhood schools in her district,” and that efforts to help families with children in selective enrollment schools would be better spent in finding the funds to restore transportation for selective enrollment students whose bus service has been cut.

Macaraeg and Guffey reported from Chicago.

Staff members delivered a petition with 150 signatures to Columbia President and CEO Kwang-Wu Kim, who is stepping down in July, imploring him to seek alternative budget strategies.

Professional staff numbers have been dwindling at Columbia for years, with currently only 275 staffers employed in 2024. Since 2015, layoffs have affected more than a third of the professional staff, according to the United Staff of Columbia College, the union representing Columbia employees.

Union representatives say the layoffs will most affect the roughly 6,000 students at Columbia in the South Loop, potentially creating longer wait times to meet with academic advisers, difficulty meeting with campus therapists and reduced support in the Department of Equity and Inclusion.

“Additional cuts would only further damage our community and our collective efforts to support our mission,” said USofCC spokesperson Craig Sigele in an email Monday. “Reducing our staff would mean declining the support and services we can offer students, which isn’t fair to them. They deserve a college that’s fully equipped to support their success.”

In an emailed statement, Lambrini Lukidis, Columbia’s associate vice president for strategic communications and external relations, said the college was instructed by the Board of Trustees to cut the school’s budget deficit in half by September. The college’s deficit is expected to be $38 million at the end of the current fiscal year.

Lukidis said layoffs are “an unavoidable part of budget reductions at this time,” as half of Columbia’s operating budget is personnel-related expenses.

“The college is prioritizing the elimination of vacant positions and striving for proportional balance between non-union and union staff positions. Our goal is to minimize the number of position eliminations as much as possible by finding alternative reductions in non-personnel expenses where feasible and advisable,” Lukidis said in the email.

The Columbia College Board of Trustees also voted to increase tuition in the fall of 2024.

The college was already experiencing significant financial challenges when it was met with Columbia College Faculty Union’s 49-day strike, which was believed to be the longest in higher-education history. In a statement, the college said the strike cost the institution $13 million.

The walkout kept nearly 600 part-time faculty members out of their classrooms for nearly two months while department chairs and some full-time faculty members took over those classes. Some classes were at a standstill without an instructor until the semester ended Saturday, and some had shifted to an asynchronous model.

Prior to the strike, department chairs at Columbia were told to eliminate five to six courses for each of the 58 academic programs, a few weeks before the fall semester began.

Kim’s term ends July 1. Jerry Tarrer, senior vice president of business affairs, will assume duties as interim president the next day while a search for a new president is underway.

aguffey@chicagotribune.com