Fatuous Times at Clemente High
“When the press grants anonymity, they don’t mean thinly disguised. They mean, unrecognizable.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I don’t know what higher standards there could have been. If we’d vetted what they said until it left no trail, there’d have been no story. I told Blanchard to go back to them and ask them point-blank if they were prepared to live with the consequences. She did, they were, and the story ran.
Patrick’s at another public high school this fall, while Sarah has left the system and is now teaching at a private school for much less pay. But Meg–that is Kay Thompson–dug in her heels. She went to the ACLU and the ACLU went to federal court. The transfer, her lawsuit alleges, is punitive and violates her First Amendment rights. The board backed down, and that’s why Thompson is back in business at Clemente. Which explains the pickets and fliers and why 150 or so of Clemente’s 3,000-some students have boycotted classes.
Says Enrique Fernandez, “That’s clearly a racist statement. I don’t understand what connection you can make between Latino students and incest. If you are a teacher, I would expect a responsible attitude before you make a statement on that problem, which we all face.”
The last time we talked, she’d “sort of rethought” the notion that her subjects should have been better protected. “I would have muddied the article and what they were saying if I’d made them more generic,” she said. “Such as when Patrick refers to teaching from tattered copies of Franny and Zooey [“I’m teaching copies of Franny and Zooey that look like somebody’s eaten them”]. Do we cut that?”
The gaping wound of commerce-free real estate on which the Fourth Presbyterian Church stands has everybody worried. No one is making any money there. Yet preservationists speak well of the old stone church. What to do?
