This American Life - 263: Desperate Measures

Broadcast on: 16 Apr 2004

Principal Gartner and Assistant Principal James have tried everything they know how to try. They found paperwork, they've talked to people above them, they've gotten the parents from their school to go and stand up at school board meetings. Nothing's worked. "We were told a new school would happen this is about six years ago." They ran a public elementary school in Chicago called the Richard E. Bird Community Academy. The school has no lunchroom, no auditorium, no gymnasium. Even for Chicago, it's pretty bad. Promises were made. Land has been cleared. A sign has been posted for years and years and years. We have gone through planning right down to picking out tile and then it's not happening. "It go out bullet hole in the window. It go out missing drinking fountain and they go out other bullet hole in the window over there." Capris, the fifth grader, takes me on a tour of what's wrong with the building. Things are going nowhere in the campaign to get a new school. And to the fifth grader's inner class, room 405 got involved this fall. Among the things that got amaddest about the school was the heating system. Here's DBL. "Like our flesh and the winter, the heat was supposed to be on both. We had to put on our heads, our coats, our gloves. We put on our gloves. We can't even hardly write because people have been having men as you know you can't write when you don't need it." They walked me to the bathrooms. There's no soap, no paper towels, no paper towels dispensers. Door is missing from the stalls. "Man got our own privacy and their doors on the stalls and I don't know about using it in the bathrooms anymore. So what does everybody do? Just hold it in." "We're going to take it out of our tile. I love trunk. It's a bootleg trunk. We got a bootleg lunchroom because it's a hallway with just tables in it." The bootleg lunchroom features bootleg cafeteria ladies who look just like any cafeteria ladies anywhere except they're serving chicken nuggets and corn and milk in the middle of the school hallway. The kids in the room four or five decided they needed a new school back in the fall when the teacher Brian Shultz, a young idealistic teacher in his second year, decided to try something new. A program called Project Citizen, where the kids would pick some problem in the school or the neighborhood that they wanted to solve and then they would solve it together as a class. So one day Mr. Shultz stood at the board and had the name possible problems that they could address. "Some of the problems that they came up with were everything from wanting to clean up litter in the parks to teenage pregnancy to stopping Michael Jackson." "Did you try to get them to just choose one problem?" "That was the aim was to pick one problem and truly I thought that they would pick something like getting mandatory recess every day or getting a different selection of drinks at lunch." When the kids started naming the problems of their own school he says, the feeling was so many of these problems could not be solved one by one. The only way to get an auditorium or lunchroom would probably be just to build a whole new school, the one they were supposed to get six years ago. The one whose plans are actually on display in the entryway of this building for them to see as they walk in each morning. So that's what they decided to go for. They've had politicians visit, they've written gutters to the head of Chicago schools, they've been TV crews, there's been coverage in the newspapers, but Bird sits in the middle of Cabrini Green, one of the most famous public housing complexes in the country, and the city of Chicago is tearing down the public housing high rises around the school. Lots of Cabrini is already gone, replaced with expensive town homes. Assistant Principal James says that maybe the new school will come only when this process is finished. "Maybe this is what's happening. Maybe the plan is to let's just stall it, stall it, stall it until the buildings are torn down and the new town homes are all in place and we get the population we want for the new schools, but not for our students. It'll be for the new residents because they're going to need a school." "I think they're going to fix stuff up. I don't really think they're going to get us a new school."

"Because they're going to build condos over here. Because my mom would say it that like when they knock down our projects, like all the other people finna move over here,

Transcription truncated.