Shanti Elliott doesn’t love the current Civic Engagement program either. As the director of Civic Engagement, she sees a lot of flaws in the current situation. “ I would prefer Civic engagement much more through classes as opposed to this separate program and separate set of requirements,” Elliott said. “Which does feel forced. It feels artificial.” Elliott may be losing hope. She hasn’t posted on her blog in over 2 months, since March 5th.
During her day, she “[has] off-campus events and meetings that help [her] form relationships and learn about issues and methods to connect with classes, initiatives, and individual students at Parker.”
To her, this means attending a meeting of the organization Chicago Women Take Action. An organization
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“My vision of democratic leadership is you take everybody's ideas and you consider them all,” Elliott said, speaking of Katz, “and she was not doing that. At all.” She explained how this meeting connected to Paker using an example of Mr. Conlon, a history teacher, and the graduated tax proposal the women had been discussing. “Mr. Conlon teaches economics, this would be a great resource for him to use in his economics class,” Elliott said, “to know about who could address local economic questions, like who’s working on this, how are they working on this.” Elliott desperately wants to connect the civic engagement program directly with classes. She will even bring back an old class to do that. “We used to have a class, a leadership class, and that was a good way to do it.,” Elliott said. “For me, I think what we probably should’ve done was just have a leadership class.” Preferably, the program would not have separate requirements and would just be implemented in every course. “It [could be] just an extension of the class into the wider city-which I think is what students really want. They want to know how this connects to the wider