Former Vice Lords Chiefs Now Going a Round for the Kids
Recently, a teacher noticed one student scrawling the letters “CVL” on his notebook, letters that stand for Conservative Vice Lords. She told Moore-Ollie she believed the boy was being recruited by the gang, so the principal called Fitzpatrick and asked him to speak with the boy.
“When Chevez walked into the room, the child’s eyes opened so wide,” Moore-Ollie recalled. “He knew exactly who Chevez was, and he couldn’t believe it. Chevez sat down and said, ‘So you want be a gangbanger? Let me tell you where that’s gonna lead.'”
She left the two alone, let Fitzpatrick speak to the boy directly, in the language of the streets. “The child has been different ever since,” Moore-Ollie said. “He has been doing better, behavior-wise, and he’s focusing more on school.”
The principal acknowledges that having Fitzpatrick and Brown in and around the school is, to say the least, nontraditional. But this is a struggling school that Moore-Ollie has been a part of for two decades, both as a teacher and administrator, and it’s in the neighborhood where she was raised and still resides. The least of her concerns is what people outside the community might think about her approach.
“You have to do what’s best for your children and your school community,” Moore-Ollie said. “The people at ( Chicago Public Schools), they don’t see the children every day, they don’t see them come through the door in bare feet, hungry and fighting.
They’re not giving us the tools to be effective, so if they don’t, I have to go out and find the tools I need.”
Williams, whose 9-year-old is in the third grade at Penn, said that — to her surprise — she believes Brown has changed: “Now he’s the sweetest person in the world. He’s helping with the kids, he’s helping with the school. I was going to transfer my baby out of there. But it has changed and now she’s doing real good.”
Williams paused and laughed, still surprised at the turnaround: “Derek used to be the problem. He knows he was one of the ones that caused all this trouble around here. And he seems to know that he’s got to be the one to try to fix it
