The state-mandated program that educates probationers in Cook County will ignore the City Colleges of Chicago’s second demand that it vacate a building on Olive-Harvey College’s campus on South Woodlawn Avenue.
Probation Challenge Inc. received a fax May 12 from CCC giving him until May 21 to vacate Building #4 on the South Side campus. The first notification, sent in February, gave the program until April 30 to leave. According to the state’s The Probation Challenge Act of 1981, the program must be housed on CCC grounds.
The program’s administrator, Rev. Harold Bailey, said he was given the option to stay on the campus beyond April 30, but in another building, after the Chicago Defender ran a story in the April 23 edition about the program’s possible demise.
Bailey said CCC told him the program could move to the other building, but could only occupy two rooms, a huge space reduction since Probation Challenge had full use of Building #4. Two rooms are not large enough to house the program that provides G.E.D. and computer training, and multi-media broadcasting for students enrolled in Probation Challenge, he said. “They said we could move into two small cubby holes, smaller than the average classroom size.
There is no way we can effectively operate fully in two rooms,” Bailey said. Bailey refuses to leave and the program still operates out of Building #4. He said he is open to moving elsewhere on Olive- Harvey’s campus, but needs more space than administrators want to give him. A little more space is what Bailey said the program was offered, but it is still not enough to enable them to keep the broadcasting portion of the program.
“They want to give us a few rooms in Building #6, but now they are re-considering that. We need to keep all of our programs for these students. Our worldwide broadcasting capabilities are a gold mine for these young men and women.
This multi-media technology is something most of them can’t afford, and we offer them the training at no cost,” Bailey said. A spokeswoman for CCC said the future of the program and its housing plans was discussed at a recent planning session, but no decisions were made.
“Olive-Harvey’s Adult Education Division will continue to register G.E.D. students under the Probation Challenge program,” said Elsa Tullos, spokeswoman for CCC and Olive-Harvey. About 100,000 men and women have enrolled in Probation Challenge since it began in the late Appellate Court Justice R. Eugene Pincham’s courtroom in 1979, according to Bailey.
Three years after it started, the late Mayor Harold Washington lobbied for the program to move to Olive-Harvey.
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