With the merger of Ogden and Jenner elementary schools underway, Chicago Public Schools earlier this month removed the well-respected principal of the former from his post of three years. Dr. Michael Beyer, who’s worked for the district since 2003 and has earned accolades as a principal, was accused by the Chicago Board of Education’s inspector general of falsifying attendance records across Ogden’s three K-12 campuses comprising some 1,900 students. Now Beyer is suing the school district claiming he hasn’t been given a fair chance to defend himself.
All of this comes as the merger of Ogden Elementary in the Gold Coast with Jenner Academy in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood enters its first year. The merger effectively closes Jenner and consolidates its students with Ogden students across two buildings. This is the school closure that sociologist and education activist Eve Ewing recently described to the Reader as “really interesting because no one even calls it a school closing . . . because it was a community-driven process.”
Schmitt said Beyer’s alleged admission of guilt as presented by the OIG’s report was a quote taken out of context, and that his client never told any parents they had to unenroll their students. Rather, he said, the decisions to unenroll were made by families who didn’t want their children to accrue truancy records with CPS while in school abroad.
The day before filing the complaint, Ogden’s LSC passed a resolution decrying the OIG’s report as “highly suspect” and “lacking substantiation.” It noted that Beyer’s efforts to curb students’ absences were ignored and criticized the OIG for “having failed to interview the families noted in the report, thereby preventing an accurate understanding of the complex needs of a school that commonly serves and supports international families, many of whom have dual citizenship and requirements to work abroad for periods of the year.” Sources with knowledge of the Ogden community interviewed by the Reader said that some families go abroad for diplomatic, humanitarian, or corporate work for months at a time, enrolling their students at foreign schools or temporarily homeschooling.
