On Thursday, March 21, parents at the Oscar Mayer Elementary School, 2250 N. Clifton, will lead prospective parents on a tour of the facilities. They’ll show the usual sights: the art and music rooms, the computer lab, the two well-stocked libraries, and the newly renovated playground. They’ll recite statistics: higher than average reading and math test scores (at least higher than the average for Chicago’s public schools), low class sizes, and low rates of student truancy and disobedience.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Oscar Mayer is not a magnet school, where enrollment is limited by lottery or test scores. It’s a neighborhood public school, which means it must take all students within its boundaries (roughly Halsted to Ashland and Armitage to Wrightwood).
Yet only about half of the school’s 650 students live in the area. The vacancies are filled by a voluntary busing program that brings children to Mayer from neighborhoods on the north and near south sides. The reason for the vacancies may have less to do with Mayer than with the status-conscious attitudes of the well-paid professionals who live in Lincoln Park.
“For years we had a principal who really trusted us. If we wanted to do something, he’d say, ‘Go do it,’” says Sirkin. “We were able to have an art program–even after the central office cut money for art–because we raised money for supplies and we had parents willing to teach the course.”
Teachers coordinate the volunteers, and for the most part they say they welcome the help. “I want parents to get involved,” says Maggie Sullivan, a sixth-grade teacher. “I’m not threatened by it.”
“I’d like to see us really press forward and make curriculum changes,” says Sirkin. “I’d like to see more writing and reading in the upper grades. We don’t have to accept the curriculum that the central office forces on us. This is reform; we can be a little bolder.”
