It was roughly one year ago that activists first sounded the alarm about overcrowded schools in Edgewater, West Rogers Park, and other neighborhoods on the far north side. Since then, parents, teachers, and principals have formed coalitions, petitioned politicians, and pleaded with school-board officials for relief. They’ve scouted the area, looking to rent classrooms in synagogues, churches, and armories. One school–Gale–will soon go on a year- round schedule so all of its students won’t attend school at the same time.
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Creating more classrooms means raising taxes and possibly alienating taxpayers–a risk few politicians or school-board members are willing to take. For all the rhetoric about reform, the children of Chicago’s north-side schools remain relegated to second-class status. “The bottom line on school reform is that it brought democracy to the local schools,” says Berkman. “And democracy is a great thing. But democracy without money means nothing.”
The north side’s crowded conditions are the result of a decade of demographic changes. Since the early 1980s new immigrants–Koreans, Assyrians, Russian Jews, and Haitians among them–as well as professional and working-class blacks, whites, and Hispanics have been migrating to the north side. With them have come their school-age children. “Just a few years ago we had empty classrooms on the north side,” says Tee Galley, a longtime school activist and resident of West Rogers Park. “It’s a stable community. My husband and I have had our building for 34 years. Our kids graduated years ago. But now there’s new families with children on the block. It’s a recent demographic phenomenon.”
Almost every north-side activist agrees, but the school board has hesitated to provide the demountables. Some board members seem to associate them with the infamous mobile units used in the 1960s by school superintendent Benjamin Willis to keep blacks in overcrowded black schools and out of underused white ones. Though the north-side activists say they’re an integrated bunch who wouldn’t use the demountables to promote segregation, board officials still haven’t relented.
Berkman was outraged. “I see it as a taxpayers’ issue. We’re so overcrowded at Clinton we have to rent space from a little private Greek school down the street. Meanwhile the Green School–which is public property–is being rented for about $25,000 a year to a parochial school. Isn’t that bizarre? People say, ‘Well, it’s only 14 classrooms.’ But we need those classrooms. Symbolically, it stinks.”
