School board chief asks kids: 'How can I help?'
Rides bus with Fenger students to show safety is a big concern
Last Thursday morning, Chicago School Board President Michael Scott stood on a corner at Altgeld Gardens and surveyed the landscape.
The unseasonable chill was a warning of things to come.
It would not do to have students waiting in a snowstorm for a bus to take them to Fenger High School.
Scott thought arrangements had been made with a local community center.
"What community center? Where?" asked Marguerite Jacobs, the lone parent on hand when the yellow school bus rolled up at 7 a.m.
Although her son is not yet in high school, Jacobs said she is concerned about CPS' plan to keep sending students to Fenger.
"My kid is not going to walk into this mess," she said.
Turns out, the community center that Scott thought would be a haven is a couple of blocks away and doesn't open so early in the morning.
These kinds of glitches make him want to "see for himself" how the Board of Education is responding to the controversy surrounding the beating death of Fenger student Derrion Albert.
"When I have my board meetings, parents from the different communities tell me what is going on, and I'm getting conflicting stories," he said.
But the Chicago school system also has a lot on the line.
With U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan approving a $500,000 emergency grant that will fund efforts to stabilize Fenger and the surrounding elementary schools, school leaders are under a lot of pressure to get it right.
So far, four people have been charged in the fatal beating of Derrion -- one of them a 14-year-old.
Since the tragedy, five students have been arrested at Fenger for a lunchroom brawl.
Shortly after 7 a.m. each school day, Fenger students emerge from the shadows of Altgeld Garden's renovated buildings.
About 40 students board two buses for the 30-minute ride to Fenger.
"Half the time, you can't even get them to speak to you," Jacobs told Scott.
Scott boarded the bus last and took an empty seat near the front. After introducing himself, Scott tried to get the teens to open up.
"Is there anything we can do?" he asked.
Silence.
He tried again.
"Somebody told me you are angry, is that true?" he asked.
"Somebody? Right," a student fired back.
"What about the school itself?" Scott asked.
"It's not good," someone shouted out.
Halfway through the ride, the students began to loosen up.
"I don't want to come over here," said a girl who sat with a group in the back of the bus.
"You want to go to Carver?" Scott asked.
"Nobody likes Fenger," she said.
Not everyone agreed with her.
"It is OK. It is working for me," said Curtis Davis, a senior, who kept his hands balled into fists for the entire trip.
Although mostly silent, he responded with a disbelieving shake of his head to some of the things his classmates said.
Basketball and dreams of attending Wake Forest College have kept him out of trouble.
"For them, it's bad. But I don't have a problem," he told me. "I was never around when there was fighting."
Scott, who is serving his second stint as head of the school board, asked how many students wanted to attend Carver.
"I can make it happen for you,"he told them.
Only a few hands went up.
Last week, CPS Chief Ron Huberman said he had reached out to nearly all of the Altgeld families and only six of the 100 Fenger students living in Altgeld Gardens wanted to transfer to Carver Military Academy.
"Unless you guys let me know how I can help you, there's not much I can do," Scott told the students on the bus.
When the Altgeld students arrived at Fenger, they joined others waiting to pass through the metal detectors.
Except for the school employees who were posted outside the school, the streets were empty of adults.
Scott was disappointed.
"We promised to provide children with safe passage," he said. "What I learned today is that not all of the things we have committed to have been done."
Scott's hands-on-approach to the problems at Fenger is a sign that student safety is now a top priority.