Program Overview
Ken Davis is joined by The Chicago Tribune’s Juan Perez, Jr and Jennifer Smith Richards, two reporters with the on-going Betrayed series, which details a decade of sexual abuse at Chicago Public Schools. They tell us that there are serious issues with the way that reports of sexual abuse are handled at CPS, in that all staff are designated reporters, and are mandated to contact DCFS before their own supervisors. There are also, they report, critical issues with Illinois’ State’s child protection laws with their weak background check requirements and their failure to legally prohibit sexual contact between school staff and students who are 18 or older. They outline the dual role the CPS Law Department has had as both a collector if information and, at times, a prosecutor of its students. And they point out that Nicholas Schuler, the CPS Inspector General, will now be tasked with investigating both current and past cases for the school system.
In the second segment, Davis is joined by the BGA’s Alejandra Cancino, who, along with Odette Yousef of WBEZ examined thousands of public records to conclude that the CHA has been negligent for years in the inspection, operation and maintenance of its more than 150 elevators. Firefighters have been called to their buildings hundreds of times to free trapped people from jammed elevators just in the past couple of years. Some buildings, she tells us, date from 1956, but have never had their elevators’ mechanical systems upgraded or replaced. Coincidentally, shortly before the BGA/WBEZ story published, the CHA announced a $25 million contract to renovate all of its elevators by 2020. This program was produced by Chicago Access Network Television (CAN TV).