|
|
|
Despite school's closing, pupils' battle a
success
Eric
Zorn
June 8, 2004
Three weeks ago, when workers installed new soap dispensers in the bathrooms at
Byrd Community Academy, it was a particularly great day.
"The kids were thrilled," said 5th grade teacher Brian Schultz.
"They put soap on their hands and ran through the halls yelling, `We've
got soap! We've got soap!'"
It wasn't quite a new building, which was the goal of the campaign that the 16
pupils in Schultz's classroom kicked off in December. But it looked like
tangible evidence that the Chicago Board of Education planned to fix the
glaring problems the pupils had identified in their learning environment.
Stories about these problems, including broken water fountains, bullet-riddled
windows and broken thermostats and light fixtures, had turned Byrd into a
national symbol of the squalid inequalities in public education. And Schultz's
pupils had come to represent the frustrations and untapped determination of
children who attend dilapidated schools.
As part of Project Citizen, a civic involvement lesson, the pupils meticulously
cataloged the blight at Byrd. The K-8 school was built in 1960 and serves 381
pupils, all of whom are African-American and two-thirds of whom live in the
nearby Cabrini-Green public housing development.
When I visited in March, the pupils had just sent out a mass mailing that
challenged journalists, politicians and business leaders to visit them:
"We do not think that you would let your kids come to a school that is
falling apart," they wrote.
After my column, several local TV stations featured the students, as did the
national public radio documentary series "This American Life,"
syndicated columnist Ralph Nader and an essayist in the Orlando Sentinel.
Academics and lawmakers toured the school; Vice President Dick Cheney's office
sent a note; the Illinois State Board of Education invited student representatives
to Springfield to participate in a Web cast; and the Center for Civic Education
asked them to come to next fall's national convention in St. Louis.
All the attention and sympathy did not make it any more realistic that the
administrators would take action on dormant plans to build a new school for
them on a nearby vacant lot. Enrollment is declining as the Cabrini high-rises
close, and the new Jenner Academy of the Arts public school two blocks away
easily has the space to absorb Byrd's enrollment.
Still, soap gave them hope that Byrd would get a makeover and remain open, as
did new light fixtures, drinking fountains and doors. Principal Joseph Gartner
even canceled summer school in anticipation of renovations.
So Thursday, when Gartner got the call that Byrd is on the list of 10 Chicago
elementary schools slated to be closed permanently at the end of the academic
year, it was a particularly bitter day.
"My first thought? I was mad," said 5th grader Shaquice Davis, who
discussed the news with me and several other pupils in a corridor at Byrd
Monday morning. "We did all this work for nothing. We got the school torn
down, but we can't get it rebuilt."
But Shaquice and others said their anger quickly gave way to sorrow and has
since been replaced with pride--the realization that they got further than
anyone ever thought they would and learned a lot in the process.
Manuel Pratt put it this way in one of the short essays that Schultz asked the
pupils to write after he broke the news to them: "We started to get on the
news and into the newspaper and even got to meet senators and [hear from]
people who work at the White House. I learned how the government works. That's
important. At the end, the school's getting took down. But we were the only
class at Byrd Academy that tried to save the school, and I think we should be
happy for that."
The decision to close the shabby building "isn't fair, but it is all
right," wrote a philosophical Kaprice Pruitt. "It's time for us to go
on to more big and better things ... This is the end of the line, so you all
got to go reach for some more stuff around the world."
Never mind the soap or the wrecking ball. If these kids go on to make that
reach again, their project will count as a major success.
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune