Juris Graudins knew it would be an uphill fight, but he was determined to prove his teaching colleagues wrong.
When he told them he wanted to be principal of a neighborhood elementary school in Chicago where the children were eager to learn and the parents cared, ”they told me to wake up and smell the coffee,” Graudins recalled.
”They said that kind of school didn`t exist anymore.”
Indeed, when the 47-year-old Graudins took over three years ago as principal of the John James Audubon School, he found that the PTA had been disbanded. In the working-class Roscoe Village neighborhood on the Northwest Side, anyone who could manage, it seemed, sent their children either to parochial or magnet schools rather than to Audubon, a neighborhood fixture for 95 years at 3500 N. Hoyne Ave. ”There was not a lot of community pride in the school,” Graudins said ruefully. ”Parents` perceptions were that the school wasn`t worthy of their children.”
That`s why he couldn`t believe the reception he got when he walked into Randi Wolfe`s and Jeff Simon`s house across the street from the school last fall. The couple had invited him to a meeting, and the living room was overflowing with interested parents full of questions about Audubon. They wanted to know what Graudins needed to improve the school and how they could help. They even asked him for a ”wish list.”
What surprised Graudins even more than their interest was the fact that not one of them had a child attending Audubon. Their children weren`t even ready for school. Most of them were still in diapers.
”I talked nonstop for two hours,” said Graudins, a former grade-school teacher who had left an administrative job with the school district to become a principal. ”I was really excited.”
So were the parents. They realized the school wasn`t as bad as they had feared, and they liked Graudins` enthusiasm. Audubon hasn`t been the same since.
”When you have a group of people who are interested and the principal is open to it, it`s a perfect marriage,” said Alies Muskin, one of the parents who founded Families at Audubon. Her daughter is 3.
Randi Wolfe, who also has a 3-year-old daughter, said the 20 or so people at that initial meeting had three things in common: They were committed to living in the city; they were well educated; and, like Graudins, they weren`t ready to give up on their neighborhood schools.
Increasingly, they were seeing friends head for the suburbs when kindergarten loomed. But some were disappointed with the schools when they got there. Others were turning to private schools and complaining about the competition to get in and the high tuitions: At the Latin School of Chicago, for example, parents must pay more than $4,200 for a half-day of junior kindergarten, a program for 4-year-olds. Nonetheless, applications outnumber the available spots by more than 3 to 1, according to Janice Bail, the admissions director.
”Certainly they`re dissatisfied with public schools,” Bail said. She added that most parents seeking admission for their children to the Latin School are products of public schools, approaching private schools for the first time.
Randi Wolfe, director of a day-care center in the Wrigleyville neighborhood, said she sees few middle-class white parents who look to their city neighborhood schools. She added that they can`t count on the magnet schools-city schools that draw children from all areas and offer special programs-either: To keep racial balance, parents know, competition is fierce among white middle-class youngsters.
”The bottom line for parents who won`t even consider the public schools is powerlessness,” said Wolfe, who has talked with dozens of parents about the school question. ”We`re saying we can tackle this. We can at least try, and because our kids are little, we`ve got time.”
Meanwhile, parents with children at the school reorganized the PTA as the Parent-Teacher Organization and also are pushing for reform, albeit in different ways. Indeed, they have certain reservations about the new group.
”People are suspicious,” admitted Pam Sawyer, PTO president. ”They`re newcomers, and they are trying to switch the whole neighborhood.” Sawyer said she spends virtually every school day volunteering at Audubon and believes
”the school is okay the way it is.”
In at least two other neighborhoods, parents of preschoolers are beginnng to think along the same lines. A group living near the Louisa May Alcott School at 2625 N. Orchard St. is organizing a Friends of Alcott group there to improve that school. And according to Gary Orfield, a University of Chicago political-science professor and urban-education expert, a third group is coalescing around a South Side school.
Orfield noted that urban professionals tend to plan ahead-particularly when it comes to their children-so it makes perfect sense that they are thinking about schools before their children even can talk.
”People are saying `Gee, (the neighborhood school) would be an awful nice alternative-if we can get it to work,” said Roberta Shapiro, a hospital administrator who lives with her professor husband and her 16-month-old son in the area around Wrightwood Avenue just north of the De Paul neighborhood, near the Alcott school. ”There seems to be a wellspring of interest.”
”If we know of three groups, there are probably more,” said Orfield, who with his wife was instrumental in improving the Washington, D.C., city elementary school his children attended in the early 1970s by persuading more middle-class parents to use it. ”And if we start to see some successes, certainly we`ll see other neighborhoods organizing groups like this.”
Wolfe said she and her neighbors in Roscoe Village and Shapiro and her friends in the Wrightwood neighborhood are well aware that what they are doing also could be a precursor of what parents across the city will be expected to do if Gov. James Thompson signs the school-reform package passed by the legislature last month.
Among other things, the legislation, which Thompson has until Sept. 26 to act on, would create Local School Councils for each of Chicago`s 595 schools, consisting of the principal, six parents, two community members and two teachers. The councils would have the power to hire and fire the principal, prepare the school budget and draft a three-year improvement plan for the school.
”If the plan makes sense and puts power where it should be, we`ll be ready to go,” Wolfe said.
”Our whole philosophy of what will make the school better is parental interest and involvement,” she continued, keeping one eye on her daughter, Allison, as she talked. ”I don`t expect to put my daughter in kindergarten and wash my hands of it. I look at elementary school as something I have to be actively involved in.”
The group`s chief goals are to provide the ”extras” that the school lacks: special programs in music, art, science, an identity for its curriculum. Her group`s influence already is being felt. A children`s concert last spring netted more than $300 that is being used to buy new toys for the kindergartners. Blocks were donated by someone in the lumber business. Someone else donated carpeting, so the kindergarten class wouldn`t be so noisy.
There will be a dozen art prints lining the halls, courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago, and they will be used to help introduce the children to art in their classrooms. Last spring one parent already was volunteering her time to talk to the children about art.
Plans are underway to raise money for new playground equipment-there is none now-and to organize a preschool program for neighborhood children who have been identified at risk of learning problems.
A handbook introducing the neighborhood to Audubon-and touting it-has been printed and distributed thoughout the community. Too often, Wolfe said, real estate brokers would tell prospective buyers about the parochial schools or magnet schools but not even mention Audubon.
”Audubon School is an old-fashioned neighborhood school. . . it reflects the quiet, stable well-maintained nature of the community where children can walk to school safely and look forward to a challenging and rewarding day under the guidance of an experienced teaching staff,” the handbook says.
Families at Audubon also want to capitalize on the school`s name-John James Audubon was one of the country`s leading naturalists-and is working to develop some natural-history programs in conjunction with city museums and the zoo. ”We want to develop a theme for the school, an identity,” explained Alies Muskin, who works in public relations.
Meanwhile, Graudins has been working hard from his end too. He is proud that the students` achievement scores, for the most part, are close to the national norm-an achievement in a Chicago public school.
With Graudins` help, Riverview Neighbors, a community group, has started a tutoring program for underachieving children at Audubon. A reading program using a computer will be implemented this fall and a teacher for it added. Another new federally funded program focusing on American Indian culture and languages also will begin, upon the entrance of about 30 American Indian youngsters, who will be bused to the school.
He also is talking with the De Vry Institute of Technology to start a computer-instruction program for the children.
”Absolutely (Families at Audubon) makes me more enthusiastic,” Graudins said. ”I feel there is support here that other principals aren`t lucky enough to have.”
But he and Families at Audubon admit that not everyone in the community is as enthusiastic. The teachers, Graudins said, have taken a wait-and-see attitude toward the group`s efforts. ”They`re skeptical. They feel they don`t know them at all,” Graudins explained.
”It`s difficult to reach out,” acknowledged Randi Wolfe`s husband, Jeff Simon, a school social worker in Joliet, who said a major goal this year is to broaden the group`s base of support.
But that might not be easy. For one thing, Roscoe Village is a changing neighborhood. Luxury townhouses are being built on Roscoe Street, and a former pencil factory across the street is being converted to lofts, yet many people living in the community are poor. Sixty percent of the 500 children who attend Audubon qualify for the free-lunch program. Almost half the children in the school are Hispanic, and about 50 of them know only minimal English. Few of their parents graduated from college.
In contrast, members of the Friends of Audubon have family incomes averaging $50,000 to $60,000 annually and are exceptionally well educated. Of the 20 people who form the core of the group, nine hold master`s degrees, three have doctorates and one is a physician. Several work with children professionally, as teachers, social workers and in day care.
”There might be a bit of a cultural clash,” Graudins acknowledged. He even saw someone sporting a ”Die Yuppie Scum” T-shirt at a neighborhood fair.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that two groups-the Friends and the PTO-don`t talk to each other much. PTO President Sawyer finds the Families at Audubon evening meetings inconvenient: Randi Wolfe says members of her group are working and can`t attend PTO afternoon sessions.
”We`re all pushing for the same thing, but we`re going about it totally differently,” Sawyer said with a sigh. ”I think groups like this are good provided they do things for all the children.” Yet she acknowledged difficulty in getting parents involved in school projects through her own group. ”If you get five to 10 people to do anything for the school, it`s a miracle.”
”We`ve tried outreach to parents,” Wolfe said. ”It hasn`t worked.”
Orfield noted that it`s ”tricky” to bring together all the disparate factions in a changing neighborhood to work for a common goal, such as improving a school.
At the same time, Orfield said, the prospect is exciting, and if it works could have tremendous ramifications for maintaining middle-class stability in old neighborhoods.
”This suggests the neighborhoods might become places where people have long-term attachments,” he said, ”and it draws people with a lot of energy into public-school affairs.”
Orfield said that because of their concern about education, couples who have moved to a neighborhood undergoing gentrification tend to move again-usually to the suburbs-once their children reach school age.
Now, it seems, some are beginning to balk at that. Janice Bails, the admissions director at the Latin School, attributes the dramatic increase in applications there-they have doubled in the last decade for spots in kindergarten-to two-career families` unwillingness to leave the city despite their fears about the public schools.
Marsha Kaye, a nurse/practitioner who lives in the Wrightwood neighborhood near the Alcott school, said she and her husband, a pediatrician, are products of neighborhood public schools (his, in Chicago) and would like their daughters to attend them ”so our kids can play and go to school with the same children.”
For Marlene Winn, who lives in the Audubon neighborhood, the reasoning is far more personal. ”My mother taught in the Chicago public schools, and so do I,” she said. ”I want to send my kid to the system I work for.” Orfield fears, however, that ”the system isn`t set up to absorb” the energy of these parents.
In fact, members of Families at Audubon complain bitterly about their dealings with the Chicago Board of Education; they cite seeming indifference, the confusion, the impossibility of getting even the most basic information, such as the deadline for a grant proposal.
But that just seems to make these parents all the more determined and hopeful that Thompson will sign the school-reform legislation, which would give them considerably more authority.
They also look to the successes over the last decade of the group formed around the Oscar Mayer School in the De Paul neighborhood, started by parents of children in the school, not of preschoolers. Now parents there manage to raise $30,000 yearly to pay for a full-time music teacher, her equipment, a parent-run art program and student teachers to assist in the lower grades. This year Friends of Oscar Mayer hopes to improve the school`s science program, according to Lorry Serkin, who heads the group. He said he`s always hearing from people who want to know how they manage it.
At Audubon the other day, Graudins was out in front of the empty school picking up some trash in the 90-degree heat. He`s looking forward to the new school year and the new programs that are starting at his school. ”I can`t give up,” he said. ”Otherwise I`m in the wrong business.”
Said Jeff Simon: ”We can`t all move to Evanston.”
