{"id":477260,"date":"2010-03-26T14:42:31","date_gmt":"2010-03-26T18:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c60fd53ef0133ec3d9679970b"},"modified":"2010-03-26T14:42:31","modified_gmt":"2010-03-26T18:42:31","slug":"daley-says-nephews-school-call-unacceptable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/477260","title":{"rendered":"Daley says nephew’s school call ‘unacceptable’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Posted by John Byrne and Hal Dardick <\/em>at 1:42 p.m.<\/p>\n

Mayor Richard Daley said today it was "unacceptable" for his nephew to contact Chicago Public Schools officials on behalf of a politically active neighbor who wanted to get his daughters in an elite school.<\/p>\n

But Daley also said there was nothing wrong with the request <\/a>by Patrick Daley Thompson, noting there is a lot of frustration among Chicagoans seeking to get the best public education for their children.
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<\/br>To that end, Daley said school officials would create a new process to let any parent formally appeal if their children are denied entry to the school of their choice.
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Daley suggested parents would be able to attend hearings with school administrators. But he did not offer details for what sounded like a potentially highly complicate and time-consuming procedure.
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<\/br>It was the first specific policy response Daley publicly offered to the recently publicized school "VIP list" that showed<\/a> many aldermen and other politically connected people have in recent years directly contacted Chicago Public Schools officials on behalf of students–though not always with great success.
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<\/br>"Again, the VIP list, there’s a lot of frustration, and that’s why (Chicago Board of Education President) Mary Richardson-Lowry is putting up a, creating a structure\u00a0 where people complain, ‘I can’t get my son or daughter into a school,’ they can go right to a formal hearing," Daley said during a news conference at City Hall after a City Council meeting.
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<\/br>"You need a process. And you have a process, anyone can call, anyone can go to a hearing and say ‘I’ve been denied, I want to know why. Give me the reason why,’" he added.
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<\/br>According to the "VIP list" — logs kept by then-CPS schools chief Arne Duncan about admissions requests — Daley’s nephew, Patrick Daley Thompson, contacted Duncan in April 2008 in the hopes of securing two spots at Whitney Young Magnet High School for the daughters of a ward loyalist. The girls’ father, a high-ranking city supervisor, has donated about $2,500 to the Daley family’s 11th Ward Democratic Organization in the past decade.
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<\/br>On Tuesday, the mayor dismissed the notion that his administration exerted political clout in any of the appeals, but the Tribune has verified six instances in which the mayor’s staff or his nephew intervened for students.
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<\/br>"He did call. It’s unacceptable, he just called," Daley said today of Thompson’s appeal. "Of course, it was denied. The principal denied (the request)."
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<\/br>"I guess (it was unacceptable for Thompson to call)," Daley said when asked to clarify his position on his nephew’s advocacy. But the mayor said it is natural for people to want to know why students have been denied.
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<\/br>At least two other attorneys from Thompson’s powerful law firm also lobbied to get students into the city’s best schools. The CPS inspector general is investigating one of those cases, a source has told the Tribune.
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<\/br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Posted by John Byrne and Hal Dardick at 1:42 p.m. Mayor Richard Daley said today it was "unacceptable" for his nephew to contact Chicago Public Schools officials on behalf of a politically active neighbor who wanted to get his daughters in an elite school. But Daley also said there was nothing wrong with the request […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3992,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-477260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3992"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}