Evolving Success Story at Chicago’s Spencer Elementary

February 11, 2013 Black Truth News Archives, Community News, Recent Posts

Raising expectations

New this year, because of the district’s longer school day, is the hiring of at least 12 of the parents to work in the lunchroom and during recess. Parents get jobs and learn job skills, teachers get their break and the children are covered.It’s a worthwhile investment in the community, Jackson says.Which isn’t to say it works seamlessly.

At the end of the first day of school last week, Jackson called a meeting with several of the parents who are new lunchroom workers to hash out some snags. All of those who were hired already had volunteered as Parent Scholars. Now they’re being paid $12 an hour. Paperwork held up a few of them from working the first day; a few who did start gave Jackson attitude when rain wrecked the original lunch and recess plan.
He’s angry, disappointed, but he calms down before speaking.

“What you guys are going to understand very quickly is, it’s different when you work for me than it is when you volunteer,” Jackson tells them. “I have an expectation level, and I’m the same one you saw carrying a ladder in my suit, seeing me work the lunch line . . .

“So it’s very difficult for me to deal with individuals that tell me what they can’t do . . . because we’re in a community where they told us what we can’t do for the longest, right?”

His admonishment morphs into a lesson about better ways to wrangle the children: “One thing we have to learn though is, when we’re sending people through the line, you can’t stop every behavior because it holds up the line.”

Then motivation.

“I’m going to go back to, ‘I don’t owe anybody anything.’ There’s a lot to do around here,” Jackson said. “And today, it should get better from today.”

The principal names Yolanda Webster as one leader. Chrishana Blackmond, a parent who rescued her recess class from rain, becomes the other. He praises her foresight and quick thinking.

“It’s a difference between leading and supervising. I need leaders, OK? . . . Everybody in this room stepped up, everybody, everybody.”

The room fills with applause.

“How many times did they tell you, ‘The school wasn’t this. . . . The parents weren’t going to get involved.’ You just crushed all of that, right?”
The ladies agree. Right.

‘She’s an A student now’ In Mr. McWade’s fifth-grade class, a refresher about nouns and verbs starts on a whiteboard, then moves to iPads. Each team of three fifth-graders wields one, taking turns finding or making their own images showing verbs, common and proper nouns and rich adjectives. Steve McWade bops around the classroom, guiding some, chiding some.

One group of boys shoots video. Two of them shuffle their feet and wiggle their middles for the third one to record. Girls take photos of windows, hands, desks.
McWade is notoriously strict, expecting the students to call adults “ma’am” or “sir.” But he also gets his kids up and moving with lessons that speak to them. The photos he has pulled to talk about verbs involve Olympic champion Usain Bolt. Teachers here are trusted and expected to teach what they believe works, so he’s demonstrating probability using a game of foam dice that has the class squealing.

You have to meet the kids where they’re at,” he says when the kids are at
lunch.Alexis Williams belonged in this class, but instead she’s in the
hallway with her grandmother, Bernice Howard, who’s arranging her transfer toanother school.

Jackson recognizes the family, and hollers out, “Do I get to keep her? C’mon, c’mon, she don’t want to go to Hay [Elementary], she want to
go to Spencer.”

Howard moved last spring to an apartment too far for her to walk the 10-year-old to school anymore. The neighborhood’s too dodgy to put the little girl on the CTA by herself, so Howard rides the bus with her on days
when her arthritis behaves. No school bus exists, except for certain
special-education students.

Transportation is the problem, the grandmother explains to Jackson. “But I want her to stay here,” she says.

“And she grew up!” Jackson speaks first to the woman and then to
the child. “You knew you was a fool in second grade?”

“She grew up!” Howard agrees.

Alexis got in trouble when she started at Spencer in second grade. She couldn’t sit still. But the teachers demanded good things from her, and she settled in and settled down. She counted the days of summer until it was time to go back to Spencer. She loves school now.

“Please can I stay?” the child pipes in at every opening, “Can I stay, please?”

The principal won’t give up: There must be something we can do. You know we start at 8:45? We’re a straight shot down Laramie. The other school doesn’t have the computers we have. This is my girl.

The grandmother laments the truth: I really want her to stay. But it’s too much to bring her on the bus every day.

So Jackson will call ahead to the other school to introduce the
family.

“Between the two, you’re in a good place,” he concludes, “but I
hate to lose your baby. She’s grown so much. We want her, but I’m not about to drive you crazy.”

Alexis has disappeared to change her plain white top into Spencer’s royal blue golf shirt.

“Now you looking right!” Jackson tells her.

“Oh, Mama don’t want you to leave,” Williams says to the
granddaughter she has raised from a baby.

“She’s an A student now,” she continues, “so I definitely don’t want her to go.”

“So Mama,” Alexis pleads, still, “can I stay?”

‘You have to earn it’
The week before school started, CPS Chief Executive Officer Jean-Claude Brizard popped in to see Spencer’s computer labs. He taught a lesson at Spencer last year about the solar system, using some of the iPads the school bought through a Chicago Public Schools technology grant.

Technology draws the kids in, Jackson explains. On this day, he’s explaining it to Brizard. But he’ll tell anyone who’ll listen. Technology is also preparing them for a globalized economy where computer skills are a must.

These children were born on the wrong side of the digital divide, so their school will catch them up if their homes cannot.

With the CPS-funded equipment, Spencer students will Skype with schools in other countries, exposing them to people and ideas and ways of living outside the neighborhood that many don’t leave. The cameras will connect the school’s two buildings, too: Eighth-grade students in the upper building help third-grade students in the lower building with reading.

Brizard praised the students who were testing Internet connections through an on-screen chat. He entered the school’s “virtual gym,” an air-conditioned classroom full of Nintendo Wii and Xbox consoles outfitted with active games to reward the well-behaved. It’ll also bulk up recess because Spencer’s playground isn’t in great shape, and there is no field for baseball or soccer close by.

Descending the stairs to leave, Brizard passed a window that peered into a gaping upper window frame of one of the vacant brick bungalows right across the street. He had been cheerfully trounced in a round of Wii tennis by eighth-grader Steven Cooper.

Cooper beams, unashamed at his success against his principal’s boss.
“You shouldn’t let people win,” the 13-year-old said. “You have to earn it.”

Contributing: Rosalind Rossi, Art Golab

Article Appeared @ http://www.suntimes.com/14515036-761/the-evolving-success-story-at-chicagos-spencer-elementary.html
Article also appeared in The Black Truth News Volume 4 Issue 1 Jan. 2013