It's the weekend and warm weather is on the horizon, Chicago. Take a minute to soak it in after you read these stories from WTTW News.
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Emily Harvey, former natural resource education specialist at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, teaching youngsters about wildfire prevention. (Credit: U.S. Forest Service)
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Patty Wetli: Siobhan Peacy, a U.S. Forest Service interpretive specialist at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, got the call she’d been dreading on Monday — she was one of the tens of thousands of probationary employees fired by the federal government.
Peacy was probationary in name only, an 11-year employee at Midewin whose status reset when she took a new position in November 2023. But her decade of service didn’t count, so on Tuesday, she joined her fellow former co-workers — one-third of Midewin’s staff was fired between Feb. 14-17 — as they cleared out their cubicles and did their best to tie up loose ends.
Peacy called and emailed teachers, letting them know that the Mighty Acorns environmental education program she’d been providing to their students no longer existed.
“One teacher said, when she told her 9-year-olds, their faces changed from sad to angry,” Peacy told WTTW News.
The kids vowed to write letters to their senators, a sweet gesture but not the way Peacy wanted the students to interact with nature. There’s plenty of time later in life for protests and advocacy, she said. What she’d wanted to instill was passion and love. She’d wanted them to conquer their fear of bugs and to marvel at the way seeds spread.
“When kids would say, ‘I wish we could be outside every day,’ that means we reached them,” said Peacy.
Emily Harvey, who ran the education department at Midewin, was also fired. Her call came on Saturday, despite colleagues reassurances that she was too good at her job to be let go for poor performance.
“In my gut, I knew. It doesn’t matter,” Harvey said.
She’d started receiving strange emails from the Office of Personnel Management immediately following the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Then came emails offering deferred resignation and early retirement, followed by a steady stream of what Harvey called “daily insults” — emails from OPM like one that encouraged people to leave their low productivity jobs in the public sector for high productivity work in the corporate world.
“The overall message was, ‘You all are lazy and your work doesn’t matter,’” Harvey said. “It’s been sickening. It’s been inhumane.”
We have more on their stories and the work that goes on at Midewin on our website.
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(WTTW News)
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When Chicago teens and students face trouble and need help, schools can connect them with mentorship programs like Becoming a Man. If they’ve run into trouble with the law, there are programs available through the Juvenile Detention Center. But what about teens in the middle — those who may not have run into legal trouble, but are withdrawing from their regular school community?
Choose to Change is a six-month intervention that combines “near-peer” mentorship and cognitive behavioral therapy to help steer teens away from violence and get them back on a more successful track. The overall goal of the program is to help reduce youth violence — and research has found it’s led to positive, lasting impacts on that front — but more than that, Choose to Change aims to help teens rethink how they treat and respond to potentially volatile situations.
Does it work?
UChicago researchers found that in the two years after entering Choose to Change, participants were 31% less likely to be arrested. After three years, they were 23% less likely to be arrested.
While in the program itself, the likelihood of a participant being arrested for a violent crime fell by almost half and within two years, they remain about 40% less likely to be involved in a violent arrest. Choose to Change has also been found to increase school attendance by one full week and reduce school misconduct by 33% following a randomized control trial UChicago ran from 2015 to 2019. Since CPS began implementing Choose to Change in 2018, more than 4,000 district students have taken part.
What CPS says:
“It’s something we believe in,” said Jadine Chou, the district’s former chief of safety and security. “It’s something that has helped us. … This program has found a way — inside and outside of school — to meet our young people’s needs.”
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(WTTW News)
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Officials in charge of Chicago’s water system should warn residents that more than 1,200 water mains were buried under the city’s streets in spots too close to sewers and could pose a threat to the city’s drinking water in the event the system stops working as designed, according to an audit released Wednesday by the city’s watchdog.
Inspector General Deborah Witzburg’s audit focuses on the 2019 acknowledgement by leaders of Chicago’s Department of Water Management that extensive water main and sewer line construction work failed to comply with Illinois Environmental Protection Agency regulations.
In 1,204 locations, there is not enough horizontal or vertical distance between underground water mains and sewer lines, according to the audit. In 39 spots, the “water main or service line in fact crossed through sewer infrastructure,” Witzburg wrote.
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Back in the Day: February 21, 2005 - The Howard Morgan Case
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One of the most bizarre cases of a Chicago police shooting happened on this date 20 years ago. Around 1 a.m. the morning of February 21, 2005, Howard Morgan, a former Chicago police officer, was returning home from his job as the senior patrolman for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad. He was pulled over by two CPD officers for allegedly driving the wrong way on a one-way street and having his front lights off. A backup police vehicle was also part of the traffic stop. When the officers
discovered Morgan’s, who is African American, service weapon, panic ensued. Police claimed that Morgan started firing. Morgan was shot 28 times and survived while three CPD officers sustained minor gunshot wounds. Morgan took seven months to recover. After a 2007 mistrial, he was sentenced in 2012 to 40 years for attempted murder. In 2015, Gov. Pat Quinn granted him clemency, and Morgan died in 2022. There are still dozens of unanswered questions about the case.
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Nature Calls: This Week’s Outdoorsy Events and Activities
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Each Friday, WTTW News science and nature reporter Patty Wetli tells you how to get outside.
I don’t know about you all, but my case of cabin fever got so bad this week that I invented an excuse to walk to the post office. There are far better reasons to get out and appreciate nature this weekend.
Check out the Chicago Park District’s Polar Adventure Day on Saturday. The free event runs from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Big Marsh Park. Cheer on teams of huskies as they sled around the park, catch ice carving demonstrations, enjoy a roaming puppet show, and test your balance on a slackline, among other activities.
Every few years, Chicagoans re-discover beavers. The rodents with the slapping tails are in the news again, caught on critter cams along the Chicago River. These elusive creatures can be challenging to spot in the wild, but a trio of beaver boys lives year-round at Lincoln Park Zoo in the Pritzker Family Children’s Zoo.
We’re entering the sweetest time of year — maple syrup season. The Cook County Forest Preserve District is hosting a bunch of “Sap’s Rising” sessions this weekend, taking visitors on walks through the sugar maple forest at River Trail Nature Center in Northbrook. At Kline Creek Farm in West Chicago, folks can try their hand at maple tapping and learn how sap
becomes syrup.
If you’re in the mood to do some habitat restoration, Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves has a full slate of work days scheduled Saturday and Sunday at more than a half-dozen sites across the region.
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Do you believe in Chicago's 'dibs' tradition? Why or why not?
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Email DailyChicagoan@wttw.com with your responses and your answers might be published. Here's what you had to
say:
I think the idea of “dibs” for spots in front of your own residence makes sense because you’re not expected to park in front of someone else’s house. If you do the work to clean out the spot you deserve it! — Tom K.
"Yes, digging out a space can take hours. Why should someone else get the benefits?" — @amronnelle.bsky.social
No. It is dumb, selfish, and lazy. If everyone shoveled the space around the car then dibs would be redundant. — @jrc606.bsky.social
Dibs is for a--holes. And those who do it are whole a--es!!! You don't own the street. We all own the street. —Benji T.
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Newsletter Producer: Josh Terry
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