Parents and teachers at Wilson Occupational High School had begged central office officials for almost two years to buy them a new building–their current quarters were the third floor of a northwest-side grade school.
“In one day, they blotted out all the hard work of two years, and they didn’t have the decency to tell us–we still don’t know what our future is,” says Marlene Curylo, president of Wilson’s local school council. “Taft doesn’t want us, and we don’t want to go there. We’re being treated like dirt, and what’s worse is that no one–not the bureaucrats or the politicians–really gives a damn.”
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Wilson opened in 1970, the result of a state law requiring special facilities for children who, in the parlance of experts, have an “educable mental handicap.”
In the last few years Beaubien’s enrollment has grown, and Wilson might have been unceremoniously moved to yet another school if not for the school reform law of 1988. That law created the local school council (an 11-member body of parents, teachers, and community residents) and allowed Wilson to hire its own principal. (Before that, Wilson had been run by the principal of whatever school it was housed in.)
It took about a year for the sale to be completed. In the meantime, Mulberry lined up an architect who designed plans for the new Wilson facility. Mulberry also got McDonald’s to agree to donate nearly $150,000 in kitchen equipment to the new school.
“These are nonhandicapped students who, based on their low reading or math scores, would be expected to drop out,” says Mulberry. “We would put them in smaller classes and give them more individualized attention. We were very excited about this program. These are the supposed unreachable students, and we were trying to reach them.”
“We’re lost–we have no way to obtain the truth,” say Curylo. “If you ask a school official how they intend to save money by closing the schools on their list, they say, ‘There’s no list.’ If you say, ‘Well, I read about the list in the Sun-Times,’ they say, ‘Well, that’s only one list. There are several lists, but we can’t show you them now.’”
