Chicago Cares Part II

It might be apparent from my previous posting that I'm a tad ambivalent about the whole Chicago Cares event.

I've known some CPS teachers, and all of them tell me stories about how not enough funds make it to the classroom. The Chicago Cares projects gave the volunteers a taste of that. My team was driven to the John Hay Academy, an 80-year-old elementary school in the Austin neighborhood. In a six hour span, two hundred of us were to paint the walls of the auditorium, the library, the computer lab, the gym, and a few classrooms. But we lacked necessary materials -- we only had a few ladders in the whole school, and we had an insufficient number of extension poles for the rollers. Furthermore, the quality of the materials was poor -- the paintbrushes hardly held any paint, the rollers shed clumps of fiber onto the wall, and the roller covers would frequently spin right off the roller. Amazingly, we still managed to do a decent job.

As for the corporate flavor of the event... I don't want to take away from the good work that was done, but if I had to choose between tax dollars and volunteers, I'd take the tax dollars. It's unfortunate that it has to be an either-or proposition.

Take, for instance, Boeing, a newcomer to Chicago and a sponsor of the Chicago Cares event. I found an interesting article about Boeing's move at the Site Selection trade magazine's website. To entice Boeing to move here, the city and state governments handed the company an incentive package worth over $60 million over the next 20 years. All this for a few hundred Boeing employees -- executives and their support staff. According to the article, the marquee on the Chicago Theatre announced the deal with: "Chicago Wins! Welcome Boeing." But who really won?

One day each year, a number of corporations -- not just Boeing -- put on the mask of good corporate citizen for the Chicago Cares event. They offer well-meaning people to help apply a mask of fresh paint to crumbling schools. But more than paint, these schools need funding to sustain them.