Metro High School, Chicago’s great experiment in alternative education, where teachers and students wrote their own rules and designed their own curriculum, was born in the late 1960s, when the public schools were controlled, ironically, by an authoritarian central administration.
“Kimbrough and the board may think what they did is legal, but it’s certainly not moral,” says Ron Sistrunk, director of the Citywide Coalition for School Reform and a parent of a Metro student. “Some of those central-office bureaucrats couldn’t find a classroom, it’s been so long since they’ve seen one. Now they want to tell us what to do with our school? That’s asinine.”
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It’s not unusual for Metro to buck the system; it was started by educators who had problems getting along in a traditionally structured system. “The idea was to create a public school without walls,” says Shelby Taylor, a social studies teacher at Metro since 1971. “As we saw it, the whole city was our classroom.”
“We would have preferred a location right in the Loop, so the students could be closer to some of the institutions where they have classes,” says Juanita Collins, who has sent two daughters to Metro. “But the Wendell site was close enough to the Loop, so after a while we accepted it.”
The merge with Crane made a lot of sense, at least from Kimbrough’s perspective. Crane was underused; it had room for Metro’s students. And Metro was small; closing would cause only marginal political fallout. From now on Metro would not be a school but a program within Crane. Its LSC would be abolished, and its principal, Nina Robinson, would be reclassified as a program director, a position subordinate to Crane’s principal, Melver Scott.
“Crane’s students will resent it when they see Metro’s students roaming around the halls and leaving the building during the day,” says Taylor. “Crane has their way and we have our way of doing things. I’m not saying one way is better, just that both ways are different.”
So during the first few days of school, Metro’s parents and students picketed the central office and organized a student boycott. But the protest backfired.
