CPS Lays Down the Rules

For any chess coaches who couldn’t make it to last week’s meetings of the Chicago Public Schools, here is the document they gave out. (I wasn’t there myself, so I owe a tip of the hat to Ray School’s PE teacher and sports coordinator, Ms. Perez, who kindly picked up a copy for me.)

The 2007 CPS championship tournament

Notice that there are a number of requirements they say you have to meet, and those requirements are cast in fairly inflexible language: failure to meet them “could” result in your kids being banned from the city championship. Whether or not they will enforce this, I don’t know; they have generally not done so in the past, at least not consistently, though I understand Whitney Young High School was prevented from playing in a major event last year for lack of one document.

Let me call a few things to your attention:

• December 14 is the deadline for submitting your roster and Work Verification Form (details here). The roster goes to your Area Sports Manager (I think) and the Work Verification Form is filled out online, though you may be expected to submit a hard copy to the Area Manager as well. I’m not sure about that. Check with your Area Manager, and if you don’t know who that is call CPS Sports Administration at 773-553-3770.


• There will be a mandatory “coaches clinic” at some point, the date and location of which are “to be announced.” Since these announcements are generally not well communicated many coaches will probably not hear about this one. I would urge anyone who hears about it to spread the word far and wide. Let’s share information as much as possible. You can post any information you get in the comments section of this post or on the online forum of the Illinois Chess Association.


• The date of the city championship itself, which some of us were given to understand was scheduled firmly for March 8, 2008, is now “to be announced,” so I don’t know what’s up with that.

One clarification: The copy of the document I received was a third- or fourth-generation photocopy that I scanned and cleaned up a bit to produce the one I’ve posted here online. It may not look exactly like the original CPS piece, though the text should be the same.

Elementary School Sports Program (ESSP) / 2007-2008 Chess