As a student at (Michelle Obama's) Whitney M. Young High School, in Chicago Public School(CPS) district, I have been confronted with a challenge that is dear to my heart and impacts many families within our diverse city of Chicago speaking 40+ languages. 

I am native of Chicago, schooling all through in CPS but I am at a disadvantage as I cannot study my mother tongue officially for core credits and I must study French to graduate in CPS. This is not the case in suburban school districts.

My student voice is being ignored by CPSBOE.org, so please sign the petition and show your support in this Letter or Form.

Current CPS World Language(WL) Core Credits requirement policy  adopted recently in July 2024, disenfranchises less represented and less commonly taught languages in Chicago, this includes Hindi (Third most spoken language in the world), Swahili, Somali, Yoruba of Africa, Tagalog, Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Slovak, Marathi, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Nepali, Panjabi, Sanskrit, Greek, Lithuanian to name few out of many.​

UNESCO 1999 approved February 21st as International Mother Language Day, an initiative of Bangladesh, underscores the importance of family heritage languages for students.

CTU too says "Our students speak many languages—we must, too" and are striving for Chinese, Polish and Urdu.

In an increasingly globalized world, language diversity should be embraced and encouraged, rather than stifled, and limited to 11  languages CPS WL Programs offer for high schoolers..  

Illinois State Board for Education(ISBE) is very inclusive of less represented and less commonly taught languages as it allows several Ethnic language Schools’ course work for WL credits and considers the  State Seal of Biliteracy as meeting the 2 year WL requirement (link) as per 105 ILCS 5/2-3.159 school code (link)

This petition proposes that the CPS, which comes under ISBE do the same , expands its WL policies to align with ISBE WL policy, and count the State Seal of Biliteracy for meeting the two years WL graduation requirement of CPS and recognize the course work done in Ethnic language schools during high school years , when the targeted language is not being offered at high school and CPS network.

We humbly request that the Chicago Board of Education re-evaluates the relevant policies to allow for more diverse ways of language education, not limiting to currently offered WL studies in ASL, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Polish, and Spanish, and enabling each and every student to honor their heritage language by learning it well , while also meeting high school graduation criteria through this.

Please call, email the elected officials and show your support through this Letter or Form.

Stand with us supporting the linguistic diversity of 40+ languages of Chicago families and bring awareness by sharing.

Please sign this petition to foster a more inclusive, equitable, respectful, and diverse language educational environment in CPS high schools. (Please ensure to sign in with the same email ID, that is logged in)