Harper High School staff, students, Local School Council members and parents joined community activists and Illinois state representatives Mary Flowers and Sonya Harper on Wednesday at the school to address the sabotage of communities targeted for school closings. Members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) Special Education Task Force will also be releasing newly acquired data on recent Chicago Public Schools (CPS) special education appeals, including rejected requests for much-needed staff and funding at schools on the CPS closing list. After years of cutting resources, denying supports and undermining neighborhood high schools, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and disgraced former CPS CEO Forrest Claypool have proposed to close those very same schools for under-use. New data acquired through the Freedom of Information Act, however, shows CPS denying multiple requests for special education staff and funding at schools now targeted for closing, evidence of a history of disinvestment. The situation is similar to the widespread neglect of neighborhood schools that preceded Emanuel’s 50 school closings in 2013, the most in a one-time school action in U.S. history. “Closing schools is a tax on poor people,” Rep. Harper said in a statement following the announcement of CPS school closing plans. “Not only do poor people pay more for food, water, banking/check cashing, car insurance, paper bags, and loans, under Rahm’s racist school policies, they have to pay more to get an education.” According to CPS data, schools with majority Black or Latino students have been denied special education funding appeals at two times the rate of majority white schools. As a result, students, parents, teachers and public school advocates say that ridding the district of yet another scandal-plagued CPS CEO is not enough—his policies must follow him out the door.