Students with special needs who turn 22 while in school will be able to finish the academic year under legislation signed into law Wednesday by Gov. J.B. Pritzker.Pritzker signed House Bills 40 and 2748 at the Southside Occupational Academy High School and said those pieces of legislation help the state align “the law with our values.”
Pritzker signed the two bills at the Southside Occupational Academy High School and said they will help the state align “the law with our values.”
“I strongly believe that a core principle of governance is ensuring that our laws are kind to the people that they’re meant to serve,” Pritzker said. “After all, our laws are an expression of our values, and there’s nothing kind about taking a student with disabilities out of the classroom … just because they turned another day older.
“It doesn’t happen to general education students, and it shouldn’t happen to our students with special needs either. And in Illinois that shouldn’t ever happen again as a result of what we do here today.”
The new laws will allow students whose 22nd birthday occurs during the school year to be eligible for special education services through the end of the academic year, according to the language of one of the bills the governor signed.
Up until now, students with disabilities were only eligible for services until the day before their 22nd birthday.
The other bill allows students with disabilities who turned 22 during the pandemic — when in-person learning was interrupted — to return to school in the coming school year to “make up for lost time,” Pritzker said.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The state of California. New York City. Hospitals and nursing homes. Colleges and universities. Employers are putting COVID-19 vaccine mandates into place and it’s getting attention.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden said a requirement is under consideration for all federal employees. But what happens if workers refuse?
Federal legal guidance out this week suggests the law is on the side of employers. Vaccination can be considered a “condition of employment,” akin to a job qualification.
Employment lawyers believe that employers want to meet their employees halfway
That said, employment lawyers believe many businesses will want to meet hesitant workers half-way.
CAN EMPLOYERS REQUIRE A CORONAVIRUS VACCINE?
Yes. Private companies and government agencies can require their employees to get vaccinated as a condition of working there. Individuals retain the right to refuse, but they have no ironclad right to legal protection.
“Those who have a disability or a sincerely held religious belief may be entitled to a reasonable accommodation under civil rights laws, so long as providing that accommodation does not constitute an undue hardship for the employer,” said Sharon Perley Masling, an employment lawyer who leads the COVID-19 task force at Morgan Lewis.
Employees who don’t meet such criteria “may need to go on leave or seek different opportunities,” she added.
The U.S. Justice Department addressed the rights of employers and workers in a legal opinion this week. It tackled an argument raised by some vaccine skeptics that the federal Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act prohibits employers from requiring vaccination with shots that are only approved for emergency use, as coronavirus vaccines currently are.
Department lawyers wrote that the law in question requires individuals be informed of their “option to accept or refuse administration” of an emergency use vaccine or drug. But that requirement does not prohibit employers from mandating vaccination as “a condition of employment.”Tampa General urgent care employee stole patients’ credit, personal information
The same reasoning applies to universities, school districts, or other entities potentially requiring COVID-19 vaccines, the lawyers added. Available evidence overwhelmingly shows the vaccines are safe and effective.
The Justice Department opinion followed earlier guidance from the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that federal laws prohibiting discrimination in the workplace “do not prevent an employer from requiring all employees physically entering the workplace to be vaccinated for COVID-19.”
The EEOC listed some cases in which employers must offer exemptions. People who have a medical or religious reason can be accommodated through alternative measures. Those can include getting tested weekly, wearing masks while in the office, or working remotely.
Raising expectations, Biden said Tuesday that a vaccine requirement for all federal workers is “under consideration right now.” He promised to lay out next steps for his administration’s stalled vaccination campaign later this week.
“The more we learn about this virus and the delta variation, the more we have to be worried and concerned,” the president said, adding that if another 100 million Americans were vaccinated “we’d be in a very different world.”
The push for vaccines has been piecemeal in the corporate world. Delta and United airlines are requiring new employees to show proof of vaccination. Goldman Sachs is requiring its employees to disclose their vaccination status, but is not requiring staffers to be vaccinated.Grandpa’s text messages about dying alone go viral on TikTok
Michelle S. Strowhiro, an employment adviser and lawyer at McDermott Will & Emery, said there are costs for employers requiring vaccines. There’s the administrative burden of tracking compliance and managing exemption requests. Claims of discrimination could also arise.
But ultimately, the rise in the delta variant and breakthrough cases in fully vaccinated people has “served as extra motivation for employers to take a stronger stand on vaccination generally,” she said. “Employers are going to be looking toward vaccine mandates more and more.”
IS THERE ANY OTHER ALTERNATIVE TO MANDATES?
Instead of requiring vaccines, some companies are trying to entice workers by offering cash bonuses, paid time off and other rewards. Walmart, for example, is offering a $75 bonus for employees who provide proof they were vaccinated. Amazon is giving workers an $80 bonus if they show proof of vaccination and new hires get $100 if they’re vaccinated.
WHAT ARE THE OPTIONS FOR EMPLOYEES IF THEY DON’T WANT TO TAKE THE VACCINE?
Most employers are likely to give workers some options if they don’t want to take the vaccine. For example, New York City and California have imposed what’s being called a “soft mandate” — workers who don’t want to get vaccinated can get tested weekly instead.
If an employer does set a hard requirement, employees can ask for an exemption for medical or religious reasons. Then, under EEOC civil rights rules, the employer must provide “reasonable accommodation that does not pose an undue hardship on the operation of the employer’s business.” Some alternatives could include wearing a face mask at work, social distancing, working a modified shift, COVID-19 testing or the option to work remotely, or even offering a reassignment.
WILL WORKPLACE MANDATES TURN THE TIDE ON VACCINE HESITANCY?
It’s too early to tell.
“Every employer that decides to mandate vaccination paves the way for other employers to feel safer doing so,” said Masling.
Dorit Reiss, a law professor who specializes in vaccine policies at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, said “more businesses will have confidence they can mandate the vaccine.”
She believes most companies will go the route of a soft mandate, with alternatives for employees who remain reluctant.
Mayor Stephens in his own words describes the history of Rosemont and defines his vision for the future of Rosemont. Now sixteen years later and post pandemic, it is worth it to hear him speak to the past and the future and realize the visionary that he was in his own time. Mayor Don Stephens defined the blueprint for the Rosemont of today.
Watch Mayor Stephen’s presentation by clicking the link below:
Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the conviction that sent him to jail roughly three years ago to serve 3-10 years for sexual assault. The opinion (below) correctly found that the trial judge and prosecutors denied Cosby a fair trial and due process in 2018. The question now is whether Cosby might seek damages for his conviction and incarceration.
— Read on jonathanturley.org/2021/06/30/could-cosby-sue-for-wrongful-conviction/
Stacy Deemar, who is white, filed the lawsuit Tuesday, claiming the teacher training and lessons about race and racism discriminated against her.
Deemar’s attorney, Kimberly Hermann, explains that the lawsuit is centered around how the District’s race-conscious training, policies and curriculum violate federal law through “segregating its students and treating them differently because of their race.”
Here is the Federal Court filing:
“The district is doing several things, one of them is segregating its teachers in its teacher training by their skin color,” Hermann said. “You put the white teachers in one room, and the non-white teachers in another room, and you actually give them different training.”
District 65 outlines its race-conscious policies in detail, saying on its website that they are “identifying practices, policies and institutional barriers, including institutional racism and privilege, which perpetuate opportunity and achievement gaps.
“The department of education spent 18 months investigating District 65 and actually found that, earlier this year, only to be withdrawn several days after the Biden administration took office,” Hermann said.
Hermann also claims the policy discriminates against her due to its use of a children’s book titled ‘Racism is a white person’s problem and we are all caught up in it.’
“When you read through this book, quite frankly it is teaching non-white students to hate, and it is teaching white students to hate themselves,” said Hermann.
Hermann claims the lawsuit is not about whether or not we should teach children about racism, but that it is about what the district is telling students to think.
“When you have a picture of a white person dressed as a devil, telling the students that whiteness is a bad deal, and telling students that they need to sign away their whiteness, or in the classroom, saying an anti-racist pledge and putting it up on the board to look at every single day, you are telling students that they are either oppressed or the oppressor solely because of their skin color,” Herman said. “Let’s get back to teaching people to look at the inside of people, and not put skin color as the only thing that we are looking at about a person.”
Deemar is represented by a conservative law firm, the Southeastern Legal Foundation, based in Georgia.
According to her lawsuit, Deemar only spoke out against the district’s racial equity policies once — during a February 2016 meeting about a book for teachers to use multiethnic folk literature in drama class.
When she did, “her colleagues interrupted her, rolled their eyes, and told Plaintiff she did not know what she was talking about.” Deemar figured “if she voiced her concerns further, she would be marginalized and face further humiliation from her colleagues,” according to her complaint.
“Creative drama affords all students the opportunity to flourish in a non-traditional setting regardless of academic abilities,” Deemar said when the district announced the award six years ago. “The beauty of creative drama is that students use their visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, linguistic and logical intelligences.”null
According to her lawsuit, Deemar only spoke out against the district’s racial equity policies once — during a February 2016 meeting about a book for teachers to use multiethnic folk literature in drama class.
When she did, “her colleagues interrupted her, rolled their eyes, and told Plaintiff she did not know what she was talking about.” Deemar figured “if she voiced her concerns further, she would be marginalized and face further humiliation from her colleagues,” according to her complaint.
According to an earlier complaint Deemar filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights in June 2019, summarized in a January 2021 letter of finding, the district began discriminating against white staff, students and job applicants in the 2017-18 school year.
And during the 2018-19 school year, the drama teacher told federal education officials, she suffered discrimination due to the district’s failure to sufficiently discipline students who assaulted her — and retaliation when administrators canceled portions of a second grade musical.
Carol Ashley, enforcement director of the civil rights office, told District 65 Superintendent Devon Horton there was insufficient evidence that administrators had retaliated against Deemar.
But Ashley’s office concluded that the district had “engaged in intentional race discrimination” with its use of racially exclusive “affinity groups,” “privilege walks” that separate students based on race, and a curriculum that required district staff to treat people differently based on race.
“[T]he District appears to have deliberately singled out students and other individuals by their race, in order to reduce them to a set of racial stereotypes. Title VI bars such discriminatory conduct,” Ashley said.
The office found that the district’s policy to explicitly consider the race of students when disciplining them also violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, with Ashley expressing “serious concerns” that District 65’s anti-racist training may have created a racially hostile environment.
“[T]hese [training] materials, if used as directed, would have led students to be treated differently based on their race, depriving them of the benefit of a classroom free from racial recrimination and hostility,” the enforcement director added. “Such treatment has no place in federally funded programs or activities.”
District 65 Director of Communications Melissa Messinger told The Daily in a statement that the district has not yet been served with the lawsuit or evaluated its claims. As a result, she said District 65 declined to comment on the lawsuit’s content.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld ran to the fire at the Pentagon to assist the wounded and ensure the safety of survivors. For the next five years, he was in steady service as a wartime secretary of defense – a duty he carried out with strength, skill, and honor.
A period that brought unprecedented challenges to our country and to our military also brought out the best qualities in Secretary Rumsfeld. A man of intelligence, integrity, and almost inexhaustible energy, he never paled before tough decisions, and never flinched from responsibility. He brought needed and timely reforms to the Department of Defense, along with a management style that stressed original thinking and accountability. Don took his job personally and always looked out for the interests of our servicemen and women. He was a faithful steward of our armed forces, and the United States of America is safer and better off for his service.
In a busy and purposeful life, Don Rumsfeld was a Naval officer, a member of Congress, a distinguished cabinet official in several administrations, a respected business leader – and, with his beloved wife, the co-founder of a charitable foundation. Later in life, he even became an app developer. All his life, he was good-humored and big-hearted, and he treasured his family above all else. I mourn an exemplary public servant and a very good man.
Lightfoot is getting blamed for the violence. All he does is hold press conferences.
The police do not do “Stop & Frisk” anymore so everyone is carrying a gun.
The police cannot chase a car so the gang bangers do “Drive By Shootings” without worrying about police pursuit.
Now police are not supposed to chase offenders in foot. These are “Alice in Wonderland” rules put in place by lunatics.
🤦🏼♀️😡 This will include stopping at the homes of gang members in hopes of preventing violence, Brown said.
“We go to their house, knock on their door and try to intervene in some ways with social services, street outreach and violence interrupters,” he said.
Kudos to the 20 Alderman who signed a letter demanding that Alderman Taliaferro, Chairman of the Committee on Public Safety, convene a meeting to take up the issue of “escalating and ongoing violence” in the city. All 50 should have signed! They demand that it focus on at least two of the criticisms I have been leveling for almost two years in my posts. First of all, the stripping of 1,400 Police officers from already depleted local police districts, leaving too many Beats without a patrol car and officers without backup. Secondly, the scheduling and deployment strategies that are exhausting and demoralizing officers, punishing their families and driving record retirements and transfers to other police departments. This is a very good and long overdue start. I urge the Committee to also take up at least three other critical issues. Lets begin with the serious under-staffing and misuse of Detectives which is seriously impeding the closing of shooting and murder cases. The percentage of Chicago Police who serve as Detectives is half that of other major cities like New York and Los Angeles. Next, the tragic absence of any substantive program to provide protection for witnesses and victims. And thirdly, complete transparency in the number of felons being released back into the community by the States Attorney and the Courts, and the possible consequences of this action. The police cannot clear cases without community cooperation and contrary to police critics, the lack of cooperation is not because the community fears the police, but because our elected leaders have refused to provide police with the resources and support needed to protect the community.
Chicagoans: if you read something today, read this. ⬇️⬇️⬇️
The Unbearable Lightness of Lightfoot’s Chicago
Mayor Lori Lightfoot is an experienced lawyer, skilled in the great game of words. She made a good living craftily parsing words at one of the city’s top law firms.
Law firm politics, played on carpets in board rooms is one thing. But Chicago politics played on the concrete and asphalt of the blood-spattered Chicago Way is another.
And as a rookie mayor clearly overwhelmed by the job, she’s publicly proven herself to be woefully inept at leadership, crisis management and the dark arts of politics.
She has lost the city. She lost it when she failed to stop that second wave of downtown mass looting last summer. She continues to lose what’s left of it. The city is now at an historic crossroads, as people vote with their feet and flee from street violence.
People who’ve been exhausted by the pandemic and the lockdowns are overwhelmed as homicides and shootings spike here as they spike nationally. Tourists are harassed, robbed, and even killed downtown.
The difference between Chicago and the other towns is that here, the people have been conditioned to think a mayor could be seen as ruthless or corrupt, but always strong enough to maintain order.
That is not the case now. Rather than maintain order she undermines it.
The other day, a young couple was pulled from their car after the Puerto Rican Day parade, and murdered on the street in a horrific video that has gone viral.
What does the mayor do? She clings to her word games, the way someone who’d just been tossed overboard would desperately cling to a floating chunk of wood. As the Chicago City Council plays symbolic politics to rename Lake Shore Drive, Lightfoot counters by also playing to the woke, playing to the hard progressive left, playing her race card, while thrilling some media cheerleaders who are awed by what they see as her linguistic wizardry, but ignoring her incompetence.
But the people see right through it. They don’t care about political word games or excuses. They care about not becoming victims of violent crime.
Many are now afraid of going downtown or to the lakefront after sunset. They don’t want to see any more children gunned down in the street gang wars, or tourists stabbed, as the bodies pile up, as Lightfoot proclaims “systemic racism” to be a public health crisis.
Really, Lori? Really? Violent crime is the crisis. The growing sense of lawlessness in all the neighborhoods is the crisis that is killing Chicago. She’s a corporate lawyer, not a wartime consigliere. But she wanted this job. This is her city. Do something, mayor.
To boost her politics with anti-police progressives, she demonized the Chicago Police Department that she needs to keep order. She’s overworked the cops, and woefully understaffed the department. The CPD has gone for years without a contract and now exhausted and at the breaking point. And it’s not yet July.
She plays games with statistics, suggesting violent crime is going down when it is on the increase. She shifts detectives to street patrol downtown, strips the neighborhoods of cops, puts empty squad cars along Michigan Avenue and won’t let police engage in foot chases.
Tourists might be confused. But criminals aren’t. Nor are residents. Those empty parked squad cars with the blue flashing lights are the wretched beacons of City Hall’s scarecrow police policy.
Lightfoot’s latest word game involves her offer to find compromise in renaming Chicago’s iconic Lake Shore Drive after the city’s first non-native settler, the trader Jean Baptiste Point DuSable. The aldermen aren’t having it.
Fran Spielman, the savvy, longtime City Hall reporter for the Chicago Sun Times, and a friend, put it this way: “Mayor Lori Lightfoot offered Tuesday to rename Chicago’s most iconic roadway Jean Baptiste Point DuSable Lake Shore Drive to avoid her first City Council defeat, possibly followed by the city’s first mayoral veto since 2006,” she reported. Jean Baptiste Point DuSable Lake Shore Drive? Pardon me? What? Who talks like that? Lightfoot is not in favor of renaming the drive. But her word-salad compromise is a mouthful of mush speaking loudly to her weakness. The political class cares. Some in the media care.
You know who doesn’t care if Chicago politicians rename it Jean Baptiste Point DuSable Lake Shore Drive? Anat Kimchi doesn’t care. She’s beyond caring. The 31-year-old University of Maryland graduate student was killed in a random knife attack on upper Wacker Drive in the afternoon. Gyovanny Arzuaga, 24, and Yasmin Perez, 23, the mother of their two children, don’t much care either. They were the couple dragged from their car after a fender bender following the Puerto Rican Day parade, beaten to the ground, and murdered in that now-viral video seen around the world. You know who else probably doesn’t care? Those victims in other police videos you may have seen, attacked in the Loop by Divvy Bike gangs. What about that man who was stabbed in the neck on Michigan Avenue a few weeks ago because he didn’t give money to a homeless panhandler? Or the man shot in the neck in a carjacking on the Gold Coast the other night? Or the family robbed at gunpoint last week on Michigan Avenue? As I was writing this, news was breaking about another family of five women downtown, ranging in age from preteens to the elderly. They were reportedly attacked on the way to dinner and ran into a restaurant to save themselves. The details had not been confirmed, but the general outline of it is all too familiar now. They reportedly cowered in the restaurant for hours, too afraid to walk back to their hotel. Does the renaming of Lake Shore Drive matter to them?
And all the good and frightened people of the most violent neighborhoods who realize that cops from their short-staffed districts are being sent downtown.
Or Xavier Quiroz, that 13-year-old boy I told you about a few weeks ago, borderline autistic, a special needs student from the Southwest Side. He was murdered two days after Christmas last year. Xavier was a gentle boy on his way to buy a video game with his Christmas money. His family loved Chicago, but they have other young children. Now they’re voting with their feet and leaving town. The boy wasn’t a baby gangbanger. He hadn’t been shot by police, so activists and the rest of political Chicago stepped over him to play their word games elsewhere. The DuSable word salad compromise isn’t Lightfoot’s only word game. She played one with me, back when I supported and defended her. She endorsed catch-and-release Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx for re-election, the Soros-backed social justice warrior masquerading as a prosecutor. Lightfoot’s endorsement was a final and pronounced abandonment of the people, who pay the price for Foxx. Lightfoot should immediately put her legal skills to work, covering her behind as she makes a 180 degree turn on police and law and order that is now absolutely necessary to protect lives and the future of the city.
Other Democrats in other places are trying to do this now. For example, Stacy Abrams in Georgia has reversed her position on Voter ID laws after repeatedly likening them to Jim Crow racism. Is it ludicrous and embarrassing? Yes. Of course. But ultimately, politics is about practicalities. People are beyond caring about word games. For generations, the people of Chicago have been conditioned not to expect much from City Hall. They’ve been trained to shut their mouths, doff the cap, and bend the knee. And all they expect was that their mayor would keep them and their families reasonably safe. Now they can’t even expect that.
