Nature imitates art. In the recent contest to choose the official state prairie grass, according to the state Department of Conservation, one Bolingbrook second-grader voted for northern dropseed “because it smells good…like popcorn…and it looks like a punk-rock hairdo.”
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“Far fewer suburbanites will be able to go through school with the impression the world is, for all practical purposes, white,” according to the Chicago Reporter (April 1989). Twenty-three percent of students in suburban Cook and Du Page schools are minorities, compared to only 12 percent a decade ago. More encouraging than the statistics are the stories: “Last year, the homecoming queen at Morton East High School in Cicero–a town once notorious for its bigotry–was Hispanic. The homecoming king at Glenbard South High School in Glen Ellyn was black. And he was not he first, but the third black to be selected homecoming king or queen at the DuPage County school in recent years.”
And if you don’t like the course… The city Department on Aging and Disability reports that it is offering a four-week lecture series on “How to Complain Effectively.”
“Every business–from downtown bank to factory to neighborhood dry cleaner–should give parents with children in the public schools four new paid holidays a year, one per marking period,” writes Merrill Goozner in Chicago Enterprise (April 1989). “A parent’s job on that day will be to walk into the child’s school, meet with the teachers, learn how the child is doing and find out how the pupil could be doing better. This assignment should also be a condition of getting a welfare check.”
