Hardly anyone–except perhaps a Chicago Teachers Union lifer–would dispute that providing alternatives to the Chicago public schools is of major importance, particularly for non-Catholics. But the new state fire-alarm code for private day-care centers and preschools is so strict that it could well cause the closing of some of the schools and centers that provide the best alternatives to public-school education in the city.
Many of these little independent schools are in church buildings. It’s a logical marriage: the churches are nonprofit and have relatively low overheads that allow them to charge less rent. And they have rooms that are empty most of the week. “The problem is,” says a woman who runs a school that she says has been harassed by bureau inspectors, “we depend solely on the tuition that is collected. We try to keep our tuition as low as possible–I do not want this to become an elitist school that only the rich can afford. And this is going to drain us.
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Strangely enough, some schools that might seem to be exempt from the new regulations have been told they too have to upgrade. Council Oak Montessori School, at 11030 S. Longwood Drive in the Beverly neighborhood, started up last fall with first-grade through sixth-grade classes and hopes of adding seventh- and eighth-grade classes. The school, headed up by Diana Butler, uses a small suite of rooms in the large Morgan Park United Methodist Church, and charges the parents of its 16 students $2,350 a year. Reasonable tuition, particularly compared to larger, more prestigious institutions such as the neighboring Morgan Park Academy, whose rates climb from $5,050 for first-graders to $6,200 for sixth-graders, and continue rising for every grade through high school. But the school may not open again in the fall.
Also facing a death sentence is the nearby Pleasant Street School, which has preschool, kindergarten, and elementary through eighth-grade classes. It too rents space from a church. “We’re fully licensed by the city and state, and we’ve never had any violations or problems,” says Louann Allen, the school’s executive director. “We had a surprise [Fire Prevention Bureau] inspection October 12–we’ve had five inspectors in here all told. They all tell us something different. ‘You need sprinklers. You need an alarm system. You need two $100,000 fire walls.’ But they never put anything in writing. I always feel like I’m coming out of a twilight zone after one of their visits.”
The city, he says, also requires that union labor be used, “and there’s only so much of that to go around. You have to have people on your staff that are very well trained as far as what the city’s requirements are–and that expertise is costly. In the suburbs you can send one of any of a number of people to make a quote, and they can usually do it in about half a day. In the city it takes four or five days to do the engineering, approve the plans, make the drawings. So you’re not only adding to the cost of installing the system, you’re adding to the cost of the estimate. And if you don’t do any part of it right, they’ll close the building down and levy a fine–$100 a day. A good contractor takes that responsibility.
Not-for-profit centers, she says, are being given grant money to make the changes, and unlicensed centers and private day-care homes won’t have to make them at all. “There’s no money for private day-care centers. It’s ludicrous that these hundreds of thousands of dollars should be spent when we’ve achieved the safety of the children.” The Fire Department tie-ins, she notes, won’t help staffers get children out of a building any faster. “They don’t do anything to make the children safer–just the building.”
Julia Draper, who owns Children’s Village, a single-story preschool at 90th and Cottage Grove, says she simply can’t afford the cost. “If we have to come up with that price, I will have to close. The lowest quote I have gotten for an alarm system is $8,000–and before they decided we didn’t have to have the [annunciator panel], we were looking at $16,000 to $18,000.”
