Essay 4061

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

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‘I no longer feel safe’

By MONROE ANDERSON

The e-mail from one of Chicago’s concerned public school teachers buried the lead. It started off establishing her credentials and providing demographics about the West Side school where she teaches. It wasn’t until the eighth paragraph in the 1,009-word correspondence that my attention was seized: “This year has been the worst year,” the teacher wrote, relating what happens in an inner-city school that had classrooms with no doors and a library room with no books. “I no longer feel safe. Students tell us they are running the school and they are.”

Although I know the name of the school, I won’t expose it. It could easily be almost any high school in any of Chicago’s neglected, poverty-stricken and abandoned communities. And although I know the e-mailer’s name, at her request, I won’t report it. She loves teaching and fears retaliation if her identity is revealed. I will, however, share more of her e-mailed words. “The teachers in our school are all ‘highly qualified.’ Many have master’s degrees and some have their doctorates. The only reason we stay at a school like ours is for our students. But it is taking its toll. We are all stressed out and some are physically ill. Many teachers are looking for positions in other schools,” wrote the concerned teacher, who is herself a product of Chicago Public Schools.

“CPS took away some of our security, so in a school with all our problems we have less security than before. Teachers are pushed around, hit, and knocked down. Last year a teacher got into an altercation with a student and she was seriously injured. The principal fired her. She didn’t have acceptable classroom management skills.”

The pink-slipped teacher was ahead of her time. She was terminated a year before 775 other CPS teachers in April suffered the same plight, many for the same shortcoming. This year, notwithstanding, the West Side high school was no different from a double-digit number of others. During a phone interview, the concerned teacher -- who desperately hopes that the Illinois Legislature will come up with more money to fund better security for students and staff in Chicago schools -- told me of an incident earlier this session. She was taking attendance and asked about one student who had missed far too many classes. “He’s dead,” one of her students answered, matter of fact. He was the only one lost to gun violence this year at her West Side school. Percy Julian High on the South Side lost a student and a teacher to violence. The anything-but-grand total is 24 CPS students to die this school year by gunfire.

“All things are interrelated,” said Phillip Jackson, executive director of the Black Star Project, an education reform organization that is determined to reverse the downward spiral. “The family provides social structure, economic structure, educational structure. Seventy percent of children in the black community are born into single-parent homes.”

Jackson echoed what the concerned teacher told me. “My school is 99.9 percent African American,” she wrote in her detailed e-mail, “and 95 percent of the students come from families that are living at or below the poverty line. My students live with crime, drugs, violence, abandonment, gangs and poverty. Many of them live in single-parent homes headed by their mother, grandmother, and sometimes great-grandmother. Neither their parents nor relatives have graduated from college. Many have parents that have not graduated from high school. Pregnancy has somehow become a badge of honor. I have freshmen girls who have babies.”

We’ve got to combat the cause -- enduring racism, too few jobs, too many guns and drugs -- while attacking the effect. Toward that end, Jackson’s Black Star Project held a memorial march downtown Saturday, with participants bearing 196 black crosses representing each of the CPS students who have been killed in Chicago in the past 10 years. By drawing attention to the senseless murders of our young, he hopes to spark a movement generating programs to rebuild and repair the African-American family, which he believes is the solution to the lion’s share of our social and economic problems.

“Father’s Day,” he said, “is a joke in the black community.”

The lack of laughter is deafening.