Chicago Public schools went through the past few years with a businessman Arne Duncan in charge. Duncan’s business acumen did little to improve school performance and student achievement. However, he did close some underperforming schools and accept
Chicago Public schools went through the past few years with a businessman Arne Duncan in charge. Duncan’s business acumen did little to improve school performance and student achievement. However, he did close some underperforming schools and accepted a few more charter schools, but overall the schools aren’t better or very safe.
Now comes Ron Huberman, former cop, former Chicago Transit Authority boss and perhaps more importantly, former Daley chief of staff.
Huberman hasn’t been in position long enough to affect much in the way of educational change, though he defers to Chief Education Officer Barbara Eason Watkins for those policies. Instead, Huberman has recognized that students won’t learn if they are afraid to come to school or if they are afraid while they are in school.
So Huberman is targeting 1,200 school children–the ones most at risk to become gunshot victims–to try to connect them with full-time mentors and part-time jobs that would keep them out of harm’s way.
The cost for this special intervention: $30 million.
I don’t know if $30 million is too much to spend on our children. It comes to $25,000 per student, which is about three times what the district spends on each student.
Make no mistake, the district certainly needs to come to grips with its violence problem. Oh, you didn’t think the district had a violence problem? Sure it does, but it isn’t the problem that you read about in the newspapers. It isn’t the roll call and the death count of “CPS students” felled by gunshots. For almost all of those victims, the killing field was in their neighborhood, not the school, and the police haven’t come up with a plan to make the neighborhoods safe, so another $30 million might not help.
Of course that violence problem in the neighborhood affects CPS students. Any time a classmate is felled by violence, there is a trauma attached that affects students. You can see the trauma in the vigils, at the funerals. You can even see the trauma in the vacant eyes of students who think that losing a classmate to violence is a normal thing, something you just get used to.
The students being targeted are already going to school, which is a good thing. They are not yet lost. Unfortunately, with a 50 percent dropout rate, many of the at-risk children are no longer even going to school, and it could be argued that they now constitute a hazard for the other students.
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