Mayoral candidate Gery Chico has an admirable idea with building new centers to watch popular high school basketball games. A more profitable – and productive – idea for high schoolers may be to expand the current model instead.
Mayoral candidate Gery Chico has an admirable idea with building new centers to watch popular high school basketball games. A more profitable – and productive – idea for high schoolers may be to expand the current model instead.
With the once-in-a-generation opportunity to fill the mayor’s post with a new leader, many of the leading candidates for mayor of Chicago are going to bring to the table visionary ideas that are supposed to capture our imagination. Gery Chico’s idea to have Chicago Public Schools build two or three premier “competition centers” around the city to house popular high school basketball games is one of those ideas, a proposal that could bring about building projects for unemployed construction workers and community centers where our youth’s talents can be displayed.
For all of the good that could come out of a visionary plan from this mayoral candidate, how about a plan that gives vision to the high school students that his proposal would touch?
The idea for the series of mini-complexes around the city for these games sprung from a complaint about having a recent game between Morgan Park and Simeon High Schools that had to be played on the campus of Chicago State University due to space accommodations. The extra space at new facilities would suit the fans of these events very well, but the current arrangements – perhaps in an expanded fashion – would be the best-suited plan for these fans instead, especially considering that many of these spectators are themselves students.
Bringing popular games such as the recent Morgan Park-Simeon tussle to local college campuses is not a problem and, hopefully, the next mayor of Chicago – a person that currently has the power to appoint those that run Chicago Public Schools – understands that building a vision for the future is a lot more meaningful than building a structure for future games.
More CPS students and student-athletes need regular exposure to college environments and other experiences that will foster a vision of successful lives after high school. Rather than spending millions to invest in the same construction company allies that will most likely win the contracts to build these “competition centers”, the true investment should be made in a highly impactful (and likely less fiscally-harmful) way by forging lasting partnerships between the local colleges and universities and CPS in order to regularly bring some of these popular games to their campuses. Subsequently, the schools can plan to regularly show off their digs to prospective college students in a non-pressurized environment that, with a sense of regularity over the course of 2-4 years of visits, can foster the belief within more of our high school students that college and advanced education career paths are real options for them. Exposure builds familiarity. Familiarity breeds confidence – and vision. Those two aspects create real dreams – and plans to obtain those goals.
The payoff with an expanded base of college-educated Chicagoans is bigger than the windfall of debt for the city that would be likely experienced with the building of the arenas within the next several years. Increasing the overall educational levels of our youth – particularly those in high-risk areas – will eventually have an inverse impact on the crime, family ills, and hopelessness that traps many of our youth in cycles of poverty and despair. Putting these games in new gyms puts our best athletes on shiny-new pedestals. Keeping these games on college campuses with a vision to optimize the chance to show more students that college is a real option for their careers puts our students on the road to increased prosperity, safety, and happiness.
With the drop-out rates at crisis level within CPS at this time, the noble vision of building “competition centers” may be a fun idea, but it also represents the unspoken and harmful message that the teenage years are supposed to be the apex of their young lives, captivated by living out hoop dreams in state-of-the-art new mini-arenas. Instead, the best idea centers on reminding our students regularly that the best within them and for them is beyond the current reality that they see daily. We can dribble our way to championship varsity games in new gyms, but without passing on a vision of what matters in the game of life, we are truly only doing nothing but dropping the ball.
Lenny McAllister is a syndicated political commentator and the host of “Launching Chicago with Lenny McAllister” on The Talk of Chicago 1690 AM WVON (www.wvon.com). He will be on “Our World with Black Enterprise” this weekend; (check local listings for details on air times) He is the author of the upcoming edition of the book, “The Obama Era, Part I (2008-2010): Diary of a Mad Black PYC (Proud Young Conservative).” Follow him at www.twitter.com/lennyhhr and on Facebook at www.tinyurl.com/lennyfacebook .
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