Community angered over Attucks closing

By Patrick Butler

The boilers may be cold, but tempers were red hot as Alderman Pat Dowell (3rd), State Senator Mattie Hunter (D-3rd), and State Representative Ken Dunkin (D-5th) helped angry parents put Chicago Public Schools Deputy CEO David Pickens’s feet to the fire during a special Monday, Aug. 4, meeting at Crispus Attucks Elementary School, 3813 S. Dearborn St.

    For openers, they wanted to know why school officials waited until the last minute to tell them about the plans to ask the school board to close Attucks at its Wednesday, Aug. 27, meeting.

    “Why are we only hearing about this now, with classes about to begin?” a livid Dowell asked Pickens. “This shows no respect for the parents, students, or the community.”

    “It’s not something we wanted to do,” protested Pickens, explaining that it was only in the past few days that it became clear that while Attucks probably could have opened on schedule, a “disaster” was likely when the heat was turned on in October because of a faulty boiler. “We did repairs on the system all winter, but it wasn’t enough,” Pickens asserted.Doing the job right would havetaken up to two years and cost anywhere from $1.5 million to $8 million, said Pickens. “We don’t have either the time or the money, but we do have a good building nearby.”

    Pickens said that, in the CPS’s opinion, Attucks is not facing a closing but an “educational facility relocation,” adding that the 367 Attucks students will be bused to the now vacant Farren School building “a few blocks away” at 5055 S. State. St., which would be renamed Attucks School. Because most of the pupils are bused anyway, “the only thing that would really change would be the students’ destination,” Pickens said. “We’re not trying to put anything over on you. We could put a Band-Aid on the problem,” by doing stopgap repairs on the heating system, “which would only get worse,” he said, noting that, in the end, the result would be the same.

    Neither Pickens nor the dozen aides who accompanied him to the meeting knew what would happen to the existing 51-year-old Attucks campus.

    An especially angry man yelled how “this has happened to other schools before, just like this.” He called the school officials “all puppets” of City Hall as he stormed out of the meeting.

    Pickens said the decision to close Attucks was made by his team, rather than anyone in City Hall. “I take full responsibility for this,” he said.

    Ironically, some of Attucks’s current students had been transferred there when Raymond School, 3663 S. Wabash Ave., closed four years ago for being too “cost prohibitive” to repair and make handicappedaccessible to accommodate disabled pupils. According to the Grand Boulevard Federation (GBF), Raymond School now complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act and is a charter school getting a $6 million upgrade as the area gentrifies.

    As the government razed public housing projects or turned them into mixed-income developments in recent years, more than 15 Bronzeville area schools closed, only to be renovated and reopened a few years later. But the GBF said that fewer than 2% of the pupils displaced by those school shutdowns are currently in any of those resurrected schools.

    “I too am perturbed” by the school system’s treatment of the community, said Hunter. “Anytime they need money from Springfield, they always seem to be able to wine and dine us. They say they need money to keep the schools open, but they’ve always got money for entertainment.”

    In the meantime, “I can’t find half the constituents I had when I was first elected five years ago,” Hunter continued. “I walk up and down State Street and they’re gone.”

    “I think the issue here is respect,”  Dunkin said. “As the community has gentrified, there’s been an attempt to remove blacks to make way for wealthier folks.”

    Harold Lukas of the Bronzeville Visitors Center agreed, calling Attucks the victim of “spatial deconstruction,” where the idea is to get the poor out of the neighborhood to make way for larger houses for fewer, more affluent, mostly white residents.

    “Any time they don’t tell you something like this until it’s too late to do anything about it, you know a deal has been cut,” Lukas said.

    “The bottom line here is money and real estate,” said William Scott, a 40-year Bronzeville resident and retired teacher from Phillips Elementary School, 4071 S. Lake Park Ave.

    “This kind of thing wouldn’t fly” in many other neighborhoods, said Marynette Giles, whose three children attended Attucks. “I worked in Chinatown. Chinatown parents don’t let their children get bused outside their community.”

    Crispus Attucks, one of the victims of the 1770 Boston Massacre in which British troops fired on civilians, “was the first black American to die for his country; since then, blacks have fought and died in every American war, but we’re still not getting the respect we deserve,” said Viola Henry, an Attucks alumna and founder of the Bronzeville-based Organization for the Improvement of Young People.

    More criticism came from Chicago Teachers Union official Connie Fitch-Banks, who blasted school officials for not giving CTU the courtesy of a heads-up about the upcoming closing.

    Several in the audience asked why there is no money for Attucks, but plenty for charter schools.

    Pickens again said Attucks isn’t being closed, only moved.

    As far as Alderman Dowell is concerned, “this is something we will not accept. We need answers from CPS. And we want them tocome back to us with those answers. We’re united on this.”