Ole A. Thorp Scholastic Academy (Thorp), a K-8 CPS magnet school located on Chicago’s Northwest side, takes academic excellence seriously and strives every day to be one of the premier schools in Chicago.

However, the gap between the Chicago Public School’s budget and our school’s needs grows each year. Friends of Thorp was formed as a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization run by Thorp's parents to fundraise to bridge that gap in funding.

Thanks to the support of community partners and families like yours, many wonderful upgrades to the Thorp campus have happened over the past 10 years. These include a new turf field, walking path, and gaga ball pit completed in October 2022, on top of the playground structure, auditorium modernizations, and an improved school kitchen so our kids can have freshly-prepared meals, as well as other smaller improvements to the school experience! Now we need your help to provide new reading centers for every classroom, ensuring students have daily access to a variety of books, magazines and more.

This year, Friends of Thorp is excited to kick off our 1st Annual Read-a-thon event! This event will engage and encourage over 800 students and their families to read as much as possible between September 11th – 22nd. Throughout those two weeks, students will be enticed with reading challenges and in-school literacy-focused assemblies, author readings and more. With the challenges over the past few years, fundraising events such as this are critical to our bottom line to support our children’s education. To encourage the students to both read and fundraise, we are asking our community for their support with donations of prizes.