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CPS to Austin High School area parents and students... 'Drop Dead!'

Grady C. Jordan - August, 2007

I was very hesitant about writing this article because I found it very hard to believe what was there for all to see: The Chicago Public School System has abandoned most of the high school students who live in Austin, the largest community within the City of Chicago. I spoke to some high ranking officials in the Chicago Public Schools central office and asked the following question: Is there a high school located within the Austin Community that is required by official Board of Education policy, to enroll students who live in the Austin community?

After much backing and filling, the answer is NO. Think about that for a moment. The largest community within the City of Chicago does not have a high school with in its boundaries that must enroll students who live there. Above: By April 2006, the Chicago Board of Education had all but emptied Austin High School, which had once served as many as 3,000 students on Chicago's far west side. Austin was slowly (and at great expense) being transformed into a privatized entity, closed to the majority of students living in the Austin community, as part of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's "Renaissance 2010" program. For the majority of residents of the Austin community, the "Renaissance" was a bitter joke, because they were realizing that the Renaissance inside the Austin building did not include the majority of high school age students from the Austin community. By the beginning of the 2007-2008 school year, the Austin "campus" contained two very small specialty schools, one a charter school. Neither of the "schools" inside the Austin building was required to accept all applicants from the Austin community. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt

When I was growing up in Mississippi in the 1940s and early 1950s, there was only one high school in the whole county for Blacks. Students who lived too far to walk were just out of luck. Meanwhile whites had six high schools that Blacks had to help fund. A young lady who graduated with me in 1953 was five years older than the rest of us because it took her that long to find a way to get to high school.

Here now in the 21st century, a New Millennium, many Black students in the largest community in Chicago have to fend for themselves to get to a high school in some other part of town.

For the past several weeks I have been working with the Austin Community Education Network which is a coalition of community organizations and individuals. Some of the organizations involved are: Westside Ministers Coalition, Westside Health Authority, and South Austin Community Coalition. Mad Dads and others. On February 22, 2006 (above) Dr. Grady Jordan spoke to the Chicago Board of Education about the situation at Austin High School and then spoke to the press as well. Despite receiving his words politely because he had once served as principal of Collins High School on the West Side and later as Chicago's High School District Superintendent, the school board ignored Jordan's plea for a general public high school in Austin. For more than five years, beginning with the closing of Lucy Flower Vocational High School, Dr. Jordan has questioned the Chicago Board of Education's drive to eliminate high schools from Chicago's West Side. Schools that have been closed — beginning even before Mayor Daley's "Renaissance 2010" plan was announced in July 2004 — in the African American communities of Chicago's West Side now include Collins (General) High School, Cregier (Vocational) High School, Flower (Vocational) High School, Westinghouse (Vocational) High School, and Austin (General) High School. Collins High School has been turned into a charter school. Cregier is now a "multiplex." Flower is now a "campus" of "small schools." Westinghouse is closed while a new building is being built, while Austin, once one of the largest general high schools in Illinois, presently houses two "small schools." No other largely African American community in the USA outside of New Orleans has witnessed such a large scale destruction of its high schools since the beginning of the 21st Century. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.

Based upon the best information that we have been able to get from CPS, there are a large number of students in Austin that do not have a high school assignment for September. What has happened in Austin follows a pattern that has begun to unfold in Black communities in Chicago. The school is closed, privatized and turned over to white operators. Calumet, South Shore, Bowen, Cregier, Orr, Collins. There may be others, including some elementary schools.

How could this have happened? Where were/are our leaders, elected and otherwise? What can we do about it now? My personal view is that the community should come together and demand two things:

• That the Austin High School facility be restored to a regular, comprehensive high school, until

•A new state of the art high school is built within the Austin community.

I urge all to get involved. You are powerless only if you think you are powerless. 

Dr. Grady C. Jordan, Ph.D. served as Chicago High School District Superintendent, 1985-95. He is a contributing editor to Substance. His e-mail address is : patoncreek@aol.com)

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