Part 4: What's dragging kids, schools down
There are no metal detectors at North Lawndale College Prep High School.
Instead, students are greeted with a "days of peace" sign that lists the days racked up without any fights.
(John H. White/Sun-Times)
(Brian Jackson/Sun-Times)
Promoting peace is a big deal at the school. Kids sign a contract pledging to it before enrolling. They take the lead in teaching alternatives to violence. And the school pushes students to police one another.
"You're encouraged to stop the violence -- and not promote it by laughing at a fight," said Hiram Moss, a student at the small public charter school. "They want us to be the person who breaks it up."
And North Lawndale actually hires enough adults to confront the social issues that often fuel violence.
Each counselor works with 100 students from ninth grade through the first year after graduation. At a typical Chicago public high school, each counselor sees 350 kids. Most high schools have full-time social workers, but they deal mostly with special education students.
As a charter school, North Lawndale spends its money as it chooses. It put money into social workers and counselors, not security.
In Chicago, it's an exception.
It shouldn't be.
This is the final editorial in a series in which the Chicago Sun-Times is advocating for a radical rethinking in how the Chicago Public Schools deals with the social and emotional needs of its students. Too often these needs go unattended but not unnoticed -- distraught kids regularly disrupt class, drag down achievement, with many dropping out and some becoming violent.
North Lawndale has its problems -- a quarter of its kids still aren't graduating. But 94 percent show up every day, and 77 percent of grads go on for higher education. Compare that with nearby Collins High School, which is being closed. There, only 78 percent of students attend each day, and just 58 percent graduated last year.
Other Chicago schools also are casting about for answers. On Wednesday, we profiled Schneider Elementary, which has made social supports for its students a top priority. Other schools use discretionary dollars to hire extra social workers or skillfully draw in community mental health services. And some schools are using grants to teach kids the social and emotional skills -- anger management, self-control, empathy -- they too often don't get at home.
But this amounts to tinkering along the edges. The typical Chicago school in a struggling neighborhood is drowning.
"The kids almost feel invincible or they've lost hope -- I think it's the latter," said Remco Papp, a sixth-grade teacher at Kohn Elementary School in Roseland, where the South Side Help Center runs a small social skills and counseling program. The principal managed to get a social worker four days a week, more than at most schools, but says she could use two or three.
During a June visit, all 17 students in Papp's class told the Sun-Times they knew someone who had been killed.
"They don't see past tomorrow," Papp said. "They don't see anything past this."
It's time to do better.
Enhancing social and emotional supports for students must top Chicago's to-do list. Another round of three-year grants won't cut it.
It's the right thing to do it and the smart thing, too. Healing our kids and helping them grow socially not only produces better behavior, it boosts classroom test scores, a growing body of research shows.
This week, we laid out a new course for the Chicago school system. With the stakes so high, it's worth repeating today:
We must rally behind the experiment the school system launched this week at five schools.
The five "turnaround" schools are adopting a proven program that features a social and emotional learning course and concrete steps to promote and reward good behavior. Needier kids will get individual or group counseling.
This pilot was developed over the last year, with elements already in place in schools across Chicago and the nation. The school system hopes to bring this model to most schools by 2011.
At a minimum, this is what each school, particularly in our toughest neighborhoods, should have:
• At least one social worker with no special education responsibilities, and at least two social workers at larger grammar schools and high schools.
• One counselor for every 250 students, as recommended by the American School Counselor Association, down from CPS' current high school rate of 1 to 350. For years, elementary counselors oversaw as many as 1,200 students.
After a push by the teachers' union, all grammar schools this school year should have at least one counselor. But that's still not good enough.
• More psychologists. The National Association of School Psychologists says one psychologist can't serve more than 100 needy kids.
• A social and emotional learning curriculum and a full-time staffer to train teachers in its use -- and to make sure the curriculum isn't shelved.
We won't get better schools unless we acknowledge the obvious: academic performance and student behavior are intrinsically linked.
Simply stated, our schools won't improve until we pay real attention to what's dragging them down.
Schneider Elementary teacher Nyree Broom said it just right:
"Not addressing these issues doesn't work; it doesn't make them go away," Broom said. "It just makes them worse."