W E D N E S D A Y
August 21, 2019 Vol. 40, No. 3 ONE DOLLAR @oakpark @wednesdayjournal
JOURNAL of Oak Park and River Forest
What does your money buy around here? Page 19
Food truck case could go to U.S. Supreme Court
Restaurateur with location in Oak Park leads fight against Chicago
Val’s wall-a
By TIMOTHY INKLEBARGER Staff Reporter
It’s been a long road for Laura Pekarik, owner of Oak Park’s Courageous Bakery, who has spent the last seven years fighting the city of Chicago over its food truck ordinance — and despite a Illinois Supreme Court ruling in favor of the city, she’s not done yet. Pekarik, who got her start in the business with a single food truck, aims to take her case to the U.S. Supreme Court, according to her lawyer Robert Frommer of the Institute of Justice. In a telephone interview, Frommer said his organization is drafting a request for the highest court in the land to review the constitutional issues in the case. “This goes beyond Laura and beyond the food industry in Chicago,” he said. Frommer is still drafting the language in the request, but part of the lawsuit, if the U.S. Supreme See FOOD TRUCK on page 14
ALEXA ROGALS/Staff Photographer
Oak Park artist Joe Abboreno puts the final touches on the Val Camilletti Memorial Mural on the Union Pacific railway retaining wall on South Boulevard just east of South Oak Park Avenue on Aug. 15. It’s part of the Oak Park Area Arts Council’s Mini-Mural Project, which commissioned 20 artists this summer to paint murals.
‘We are the equity statement,’ activist says New equity director confronts skepticism about district vows of progress By MICHAEL ROMAIN Staff Reporter
During a Committee of the Whole meeting on Aug. 13, LeVar J. Ammons, District 200’s new executive director of Equity and Student Success, presented an overview of the district’s plan for implementing the racial equity policy
that the school board approved in April. From August through December, the district will evaluate its current practices through an “equity lens” — the first step in ensuring “that academic and social outcomes [at OPRF High School] can no longer be predictable by race,” Ammons explained in an Aug. 13 memo. The next day, he saw what the district’s
decades-long grappling with race and its discontents looks like, raw and unfettered. Antoine Ford, the OPRF junior who organized and led a controversial protest march from the high school to the Oak Park police station in February, See EQUITY on page 14
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