CPS Loses Track Of More Than 1,000 Students In School Transition
(CBS) -- A full week into the new school year now and CPS officials still don't know the whereabouts of more than 1,000 students from schools that were closed.
To use an academic analogy, it's the difference between an "A" and an "Incomplete." It is perhaps the only issue that mars what seems to have been an otherwise seamless transition.
De Diego Community academy was prepared to welcome 200 new students this week.
But about 10 percent of those pupils they expected never showed up. Though Principal Alice Vera says she knows exactly where most of them are.
"They're in other CPS schools. A couple of them have gone to charter schools. We know where they're all at," she tells CBS 2 Chief Correspondent Jay Levine. "They're all accounted for."
But while individual principals may know what's going on in their schools, CPS says it won't have the precise school attendance figures until next week.
"We don't know yet what the real number's going to be," says CPS transitions executive director Tom Tyrrell. "We have the same questions that you do. It's a big district. We're only a few days in."
What can be said is that at individual schools, like de Diego, things appear to be going well, for both welcoming and transferring students.
At de Diego, the welcoming school in Humboldt Park, nearly 1,000 students -- 20 percent of them newcomers -- are getting along just fine, so far.
