Online pharmacy selling Viagra takes over link to school website
Instead of remote learning guidance, the latest school announcements and registration details for next year, parents looking for their Lincoln Park elementary school’s website are being redirected to another webpage: one that sells Viagra.
The website for Oscar Mayer Magnet, one of the city’s top-rated elementary schools, appeared to be having problems for most of the day Monday as school leaders worked to fix the issue.
The first result in a Google search for “Oscar Mayer Magnet School” was a link to the school webpage. But once that link was clicked, a page advertising an “online pharmacy” was displayed.
The page is part of a website that sells all sorts of brand name and generic medication, including generic Viagra for 35 cents a pill and “super active” Viagra for $1.35, but has no information about Mayer Magnet School. Parents’ only hope to get to the school website appeared to be navigating to Chicago Public Schools’ informational page for Mayer, then clicking on the website link there.
The school website was back up and working on some devices by early evening.
Asked about the website troubles, the vice chair of Mayer’s Local School Council said, ‘‘We are aware of the situation and are working to resolve it.” A spokesman for Chicago Public Schools didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Mayer offers top educational programs, including Montessori from preschool through fourth grade and International Baccalaureate from sixth through eighth grades.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Monday earmarked $11 million in federal stimulus funds for two projects pivotal to her plan to rebuild impoverished South and West side neighborhoods and bridge the nine-year “death gap” between black and white Chicagoans.
The $12.4 million Auburn Gresham Healthy Lifestyle and Technology Hub, 839 W. 79th Street, will take a four-story building that has stood stubbornly vacant and turn it into a full-service health and “digital community center” that will free hospital capacity in a “health desert” that recorded Illinois’ first death from the coronavirus. It will get about $4 million of stimulus funds.
“It is shameful that, in one of the greatest cities in the world and at a historic, busy intersection like 79th and Halsted, the only vibrant business is a liquor store,” Carlos Nel- son, CEO of the Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corporation, told a news conference across the street from the site.
“This was a classic Chicago community, a walkable community. Then, as my family moved in and other black families moved to Auburn Gresham, redlining and . . . white flight took over with a mass exodus of 60,000plus white residents. We lost businesses. We lost investments. We lost our train station. . . . Disinvestment has been rampant. Buildings became derelict and were demolished. Other buildings sat vacant for years. We’re standing on the representation of systemic and structural racism.”
Mount Sinai Hospital’s $12.3 million North Lawndale Surgical and Ambulatory Care Center will support construction of a 30,000-square-foot surgical center, a digestive health center and an expansion of a renal dialysis center so overloaded that it’s now running four shifts. A “Workforce Campus” and café also are planned. The project will receive about $7 million in stimulus funds.
It’ll be part of a larger project known as Ogden Commons that includes 500 units of mixed-income housing, a bank and three restaurants fronting Ogden.
Karen Teitelbaum, president and CEO of Sinai Health System, said the coronavirus pandemic has “shined a light on racial disparities in health care in such an unforgivable, compelling way.”
She said an “overwhelming proportion” of COVID-19 patients treated at Sinai had pre-existing conditions, such as diabetes, respiratory disease and obesity. One in four of those patients also suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder tied to violence they live with every day.
“Sinai and Ogden Commons is really going to allow us to address these disparities in a much better way than we’re able to without this building,’’ Teitelbaum said. ‘‘It increases capacity. It increases efficiency. And, for our community members, it’s health care right in the community . . . .
“We always say at Sinai [that] there can’t be two levels of good health — one if you happen to live on the Gold Coast or River North and another if you happen to live just 6 scant miles west.’’
Before the pandemic, Lightfoot’s biggest concern was her war on poverty and her plan to target 10 inner-city neighborhoods with an unprecedented $250 million in city investment and $500 million more from other government agencies.
Since then, she has talked extensively about how COVID-19 has turned Chicago’s ugly underbelly — poverty, lack of access to health care, disparities in investment and jobs — into a “flashing neon sign.”
The mayor said she spent most of Saturday in “two lengthy discussions” — one on the South Side, the other on the West Side — to find out what’s driving the recent surge in gang violence targeting so many of Chicago’s children.
What she heard is the “level of trauma people are experiencing” and about the urgent need to support “the whole family unit and certainly our young people.”
“What we need to do is continue making the kind of investments that today is about,’’ she said. ‘‘Because if we build healthy communities, if we invest and give our young people hope and give them jobs and give them a pipeline to the legitimate economy, we’re gonna make a difference.”