Mothers bearing children should not be discriminated against because they wear a police uniform, and should have the same family benefits as all other city employees.
It is appalling that Mayor Brandon Johnson has decided to deny the same 12-week paid parental leave to Chicago police officers that other city employees, including Chicago Public Schools teachers, now receive.
It is only fair to offer the same parental leave to police, at a time when it is difficult to recruit and retain them. The decision by the Johnson administration is a sign of how little it values CPD officers, who risk their lives in service, and how little it supports CPD families.
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Adding insult to injury is the petty rationale: Police officers already get a generous amount of sick days. Another reason cited in the recent news article: Schools have a workforce that is about 85% women. A need to retain teachers was cited. But the gender percentages of a particular workforce should not determine family benefits.
Chicago’s mayor has continually said that he supports our brave and committed police officers. I urge him to demonstrate that he, indeed, supports police, both on the beat and at home with their families.
Froylan Jimenez, CPS teacher and Chicago Teachers Union member
UChicago got rid of big-time football
Poor Northwestern University. It’s getting billions of pixels in bad publicity over scandals that have swamped its football and baseball programs. Both head coaches have been canned.
But you won’t find one pixel of print denigrating a football program at an elite school miles away in Chicago’s Hyde Park.
The University of Chicago recognized years ago that big-time football has nothing to do with academics, scholarship or intellectualism. President Bob Hutchins ended varsity football after 47 years to focus solely on the true “aims of education.”
Over time, that led to the charge that UChicago was the place where fun went to die. In the 1960s, President George Beadle green-lit a football club to bring back fun.
As a football-loving freshman, I was there at Stagg Field to see the mighty Maroon footballers rise like a phoenix to smite the North Central College crew. Two hundred of my classmates showed up to clog the field, stopping the game to protest the mere idea of football returning. The delayed game finally was played, but only after four students, including one of my dorm mates, were arrested.
It took six long years to reinstate varsity football, but on a tiny scale that does not interfere with what higher education should be: scholarship, research and intellectualism. I owe my productive life to the education I got there from ’63 to ’67.
UChicago will likely never make the papers in a sordid sports episode that significantly detracts from the austere purpose of higher education.
And up there in academic heaven, Bobby Hutchins must be smiling.
Walt Zlotow, Glen Ellyn
