“Being on probation has been very stressful,” complains Colleen Dykas, a teacher at Jungman Elementary on the near southwest side, in Catalyst (May). “Our [assessment] team never returned, so we couldn’t ask what they meant by certain statements. For instance, one item said that the school had a sterile environment. Well, that could be good. It could mean that the school was clean, or it could be bad. We don’t know.”
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Suburban sprawl as seen from the outside. Nonmetropolitan counties are growing more than three times as fast in the 1990s as they did in the 1980s, according to new reports by Loyola University’s Kenneth Johnson and the USDA’s Calvin Beale. Most of the growth has come because more city people are moving out and fewer rural residents are moving to the cities. Rural counties adjacent to metro areas were the most likely to be gaining population (luc.edu/depts/sociology/research.html).
“What some of gambling’s foes mean but cannot say is that the state ought to ban gambling by the poor and stupid,” writes James Krohe Jr. in Illinois Issues (May). “But we are a nation dedicated to equal treatment under the law, and if we are to ban gambling by the poor and stupid, we ought to ban it for the rich and stupid, too. Illinois’ poorer citizens spend disproportionate amounts of their money on lottery tickets, but its corporations spend disproportionately on political candidates, and no one is talking seriously about banning elections.”
Equal opportunity at last. Most Chicago hate crimes–the ones the police find out about–are racial, according to statistics compiled by the Police Department’s civil rights unit and reported by the Chicago Commission on Human Relations. As of April 15, 1996, there were 49 hate crimes reported in the city; at the same date this year, 66. The 1997 total includes 22 blacks, 17 of whom were victimized by white offenders, and 22 whites, 17 of whom were victimized by black offenders.
