Hard to duck plague of bad schools
JOHN W. FOUNTAIN author@johnwfountain.com September 28, 2011 7:14PM
Parents and children listen for their numbers at a meeting in summer of last year as two officials pull lottery balls for a chance to enroll at Southland College Prep.
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Updated: November 11, 2011 4:51PM
This is the fourth column in a five-part series on the author’s reflections on the crisis in urban education and his alma mater, a place he calls “Adams’ Castle.”
Miles and a lifetime from the West Side where I grew up, I sat with other parents in a school cafeteria, the lottery balls bouncing — our hopes for a public high school alternative for our children boiling down to luck and a wisp of air.
“Hallelujah!” “Thank you, Jesus!” some shouted as the balls were plucked and winners were announced that summer night.
Such was the admissions process for Southland College Preparatory, a new charter school in the south suburbs then scheduled to open in fall 2010, just in time for our daughter’s first year of high school. But with 125 slots, and our number not yet called, our daughter’s chances — like so many others — still danced on thin air.
In light of the neighborhood high school in Rich Township High School District 227, where fights and assaults, even the sexual abuse of a teacher, poor student performance and a test scandal drew local headlines, my wife and I knew one thing: That however the lottery balls fell that evening our daughter wouldn’t be going to that school.
As I took in the scene of anxious parents, the educational dreams and fates for their children looming uncertain, I remember thinking, “the more things change the more they remain the same.”
That more than 30 years after my mother made a decision to sacrifice to send me to Providence-St. Mel (and its Principal Paul J. Adams III) as an alternative to our troubled, neighborhood public school, here I was — now educated, middle-class and having laid full hold on the American dream — but still entangled in the nightmare of a public schools system that most often fails black and brown students.
Months earlier, parents cheered at a school Christmas program as Blondean Davis, Matteson Elementary School District 162 superintendent, unexpectedly announced the possible forming of a charter high school.
Soon after came arguments against it. Among them was the insistence by the Rich Township District 227 school board that the loss of students and subsequent finances would bankrupt the district. There was the assertion that some so-called “bourgeois Negroes” wanted to create an elite high school for themselves.
I remember thinking that black folks can be our own worst enemy. That here is a school system run almost exclusively by African Americans — once considered among the area’s elite — now riddled with the same issues of the city schools from which Adams’ Castle was my refuge.
What happened?
I cannot say for sure. But this much I see, even in the suburbs: A favoring of stuff more than substance; a lack of discipline among children, of parental guidance and parental participation in schools. A decaying of values — chief among them: respecting others.
The acceptance of behaviors we once were ashamed of that now are accepted as normal; a transporting of the ’hood to the suburbs; the willingness to point the finger but seldom to look in the mirror, and the existence of a status quo, Afro-stocracy resistant to accountability and reform, even at the expense of black children.
Thankfully, the lottery ball fell our way. Sadly, for others, it didn’t. And shamefully, the school board that insisted the charter school might bankrupt it has spent at least a reported $122,000 waging an ongoing legal battle to eliminate it.
That board also recently approved a plan to borrow $4.2 million for new administrative digs for themselves.
And we’re supposed to believe that it’s really all about the children? Really? . . . Really?
That much I do believe about Southland every morning I drop off my daughter, now a proud sophomore. I know she’s here — and others are not — simply because of how the lottery ball bounced.
And I know it ought not be this way.
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