William ”Dren” Geer`s career as an educator has spanned more than 35 years. A Harvard graduate, he was English teacher and principal at an East Coast school prior to coming to Chicago in 1973 to become principal of Lincoln Park`s exclusive Francis W. Parker School.
He spent 14 years there before leaving in 1987 to become executive director of the Golden Apple Foundation, an organization dedicated to educational reform. In addition to implementing the foundation`s aggressive agenda, Geer spent much time raising money from local philanthropists to support the efforts.
About a year ago, Geer found himself contemplating retirement. At 57, with a distinguished career behind him, he could have hung it up. ”But I couldn`t see myself playing golf every day,” he says. ”I want to do some things that make a difference.” So he decided to work hands-on in a West Side private school that offers inner-city youngsters a way out of the surrounding world of poverty and gangs.
The school, Providence-St. Mel, located at Central Park Boulevard and Monroe Street, was established in 1968 when the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago merged hard-pressed Providence High School, operated by the Sisters of Providence at the Central Park address, with St. Mel, run by the Christian Brothers at Kildare Avenue and Madison Street.
But dwindling enrollments and high costs continued to haunt the new high school, and in March 1978 the archdiocese announced it was eliminating its subsidy. The school was threatened with extinction, but principal Paul Adams took his plight to the media and donations began rolling in.
Reorganized as an independent, non-profit institution, the school managed to stay open that fall. It has since enrolled 200 more pupils for a total of 540 and added 5th through 8th grades.
Providence-St. Mel has attracted wide attention for its unbending academic standards, its stern approach to gangs and other anti-educational pressures and its high success rate among disadvantaged children: More than 90 percent of its graduates go on to college.
In the late summer of 1991 Geer signed on at Providence-St. Mel as its development director and teacher of African-American literature. It was a dramatic departure for a man who had spent years educating the children of affluence and whose milieu had been the world of board rooms and brahmins. Just traveling each day into the West Side neighborhood, with its abandoned buildings and uneasy streets, was eye-opening.
During that first year at Providence-St. Mel, Geer recorded his impressions for the Chicago Tribune Magazine in the form of a journal. It is an extraordinary document, chronicling culture shock, academic trench warfare and, ultimately, triumph over numbing adversity. -Jeff Lyon
AUGUST 26, 1991
I have just finished my first day of faculty orientation at Providence-St. Mel. It certainly was different from what we went through at Francis Parker. The faculty is divided between a small group of old pros-mostly Sisters of Providence-and the rest of the faculty-young teachers in their first, second or third year. There is none of the wary prickle of faculty rights and territory that shadowed the early faculty meetings at Parker.
At Providence-St. Mel, the orientation and early faculty meetings are very different. First, everyone has to be brought up to date on the latest in the gang world that surrounds the school. Whatever it is, it has to be dealt with according to rules and regulations, and everyone has to be knowledgeable and consistent in their response.
This year earrings, haircuts and farmers` overalls with the straps hanging down in the back are new gang signs. There are no philosophical discussions about students` rights to free expression or about where the role of the administration begins and where the responsibility of the faculty ends. Paul Adams, the principal, is clear and direct that any breach in the school`s defenses against gangs, drugs and the influence of the street will immediately negatively impact the whole school.
He explains it simply and eloquently. The world of the streets-where our students live their lives outside the school-is one of intimidation and territory. Gang symbols are the way territory is taken and defined. They are challenges, and they work because of intimidation. Therefore, the school must be absolutely free from the influence of the gangs if the students are to be free to study and feel safe.
He goes on to say that the integrity of the school and its ability to keep the gangs out will be tested in every possible way in the first week of school. We must not be intimidated; we must be calm, consistent and vigilant. Later in the day I talked with Paul about the problem of staying focused and adapting to school routine when you come from the chaos that PSM students come from. If they are to concentrate, the school must be absolutely consistent, predictable and safe. If in even the smallest ways it isn`t, many students become so anxious that they become dysfunctional.
It is very similar to the challenge that many 1st-grade teachers have with students who can`t focus and concentrate. They have to be structured before anything can get done.
During the past 13 years, Providence-St. Mel has been shaped and directed by Paul Adams` dream and vision for the school and the neighborhood.
His vision is rooted in the influence that Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement of the 1960s had on him. Paul was born and raised in Montgomery, Ala. As a youth, he saw and was inspired by the freedom marches and the boycott. He also was raised in a neighborhood where there were many positive role models.
In the neighborhood around Providence-St. Mel, there are few, if any, positive role models. Paul and the school he has forged are the models.
Each year the achievements of the students have improved. Yet the neighborhood has continued to deteriorate. Only 40 percent of the property in a six-block area immediately around the school is inhabited. The remaining 60 percent is made up of vacant lots and abandoned buildings.
Paul`s vision calls for a simultaneous development of the six blocks around the school and an expansion of its present 540 students to more than 800, from day care through the 12th grade.
The neighborhood must be made safe, with attractive housing for working families with young children. The school must then be ready to provide them with the best possible education. Paul sees Providence-St. Mel as the anchor and the draw for the neighborhood.
In order to achieve his vision, a separate not-for-profit corporation has been set up to develop a plan to renovate the neighborhood.
At the same time, a capital campaign is underway to:
– Raise enough money so that at least half the students in an expanded school can be on scholarship.
– Pay its teachers more than this year`s starting salary of less than $16,000.
– Renovate the 63-year-old building and build a new day-care facility.
Paul is convinced that education can be the way out of poverty for young people, and Providence-St. Mel has dramatically demonstrated what it can do. The problem is that all but a few of the students who succeed leave the neighborhood, and the neighborhood is weakened rather than strengthened by their leaving.
Paul is determined that there has to be a way for the school to create a stable, safe neighborhood where positive role models abound.
SEPTEMBER 6
Perhaps the biggest change in my life has to do with the people I work with now. Three Sisters of Providence work under me. Two of them taught at the old Providence High School before it was merged with St. Mel High, and one has worked at the school at various times since the late `30s.
The development office couldn`t function without them. For that matter, the school itself couldn`t function without the 11 sisters who work here. They provide the most experience and, in general, are the leadership people in the school.
The three sisters who work for me are much older than I am. They`re unusual in that they`re very competent without being ambitious. They are moved by a sense of mission and a belief that they are in the hands of some greater power that will use them in important and significant ways. Their attitude is in such marked contrast to the competitive, basically cynical mind-set that has been the norm around me these past years. Imagine a situation in which salary didn`t define worth or in which titles were immaterial.
SEPTEMBER 12
Kris Kirk came to me this morning and asked if I knew where she might find day care for her 16-month-old son. Her babysitter had just quit, and she couldn`t find reasonably priced day care in Oak Park, where she lives.
Kris is a counselor for the 9th and 10th grades. She was a first-rate English teacher and is a gifted counselor. At Providence-St. Mel, the fine line that separates counselors and teachers-an issue that bedeviled me for more than 20 years as a principal-doesn`t exist. All the counselors are teachers, and while they counsel-and even handle cuts and tardies for all their students-they think of themselves as teachers. It is both very different from my public and non-public school experience and very, very healthy.
One of PSM`s major problems is that while it can recruit excellent young teachers and give them the kind of support they need in their first years of teaching so that they can develop their craft, the school can`t keep them for more than three or four years. They are either young married women with children whose salaries can`t cover their day-care costs, or they are single and just can`t live on the $16,000 a year that the school can afford to pay them.
It is imperative that we pay the teachers more but even more important that we find a way to provide day care to teachers like Kris so we don`t lose people who really can`t be replaced.
SEPTEMBER 18
After almost two weeks of classes, I saw John for the first time today. John is supposed to be in my 9th grade African-American lit class, but he didn`t show up at either of the morning sessions last week and missed the Monday session this week.
At the after-school reading session on Wednesday, he darted in and sat down. He even had a copy of ”Raisin in the Sun,” the play we were reading. I later found out he had ”borrowed” the book from another student to impress me. When I asked him where he had been, he answered that he was confused about which section he was supposed to be in-Monday-Wednesday or Tuesday-Thursday. When I asked him why he didn`t show up for any of the classes, he just smiled. John was a new 9th-grader, and already he was famous. All of his teachers had stories about what John had done, but mostly it was about what he hadn`t done. He was small, bright and elusive. He was clearly testing the Providence- St. Mel system. The next day he was sitting on the bench in front of Paul Adams` office. He was there the whole day and part of the next. I overheard Paul say to him that he had to make a decision whether he was going to go to PSM and obey its rules or go someplace else. The struggle of wills went on for two full school days before John decided he didn`t want to conform to the system and withdrew.
It is sad that a boy of his talent and ability wouldn`t work within the structure of the school. Paul Adams commented to me that if we had gotten him before the 9th grade, there might have been a chance. For many of the 9th-grade boys, their image makes it impossible for them to do what will lead to success. John was driven by his image, driven to self-destruct. His counselor said that when you talked to him, he never listened but looked just a little to the right of your head and nodded.
SEPTEMBER 21
Yesterday Paul and I went on a tour around the Fairfax House. A once-magnificent mansion on the corner of Adams and Central Park, it was originally a residence for Viatorian priests and brothers. Its detail, even in its present derelict state, is impressive.
Paul is certain that if the school can take over the house and fix it up, it will give a very powerful signal to the neighborhood that things are going to get better. He would like to make it into an arts building for the expanded Providence-St. Mel.
SEPTEMBER 24
Yesterday was the first tuition day. I got to school early, as usual, and everything seemed the same. It was when I went down to the office after class at 8 o`clock that I felt and saw the desperation of poverty.
There was a long line of people in the hall in front of the office waiting to pay the first month`s tuition to Colleen Lisuzzo, the business manager. The line was a mixture of students, parents, grandparents and others bearing every form of currency, check and coin. On my way to the faculty mail room, I walked past the desk that Colleen had set up in her doorway, and I saw a group of people pooling their money to pay the tuition for one student.
Colleen said it is not unusual for up to five or six people to come in to pay a student`s tuition. I`m told that last year a 5th-grader was sent in with a sock filled with pennies to make up $12 his family still owed. The tuition is paid monthly, and she also said that the line is always as long as it is today, sometimes longer.
What amazes me is the difference between Providence-St. Mel and Francis Parker. The only times at Parker that I was involved, as principal, in collecting tuition was when there was need for an emergency meeting of the financial-aid committee to consider a special request. The rest of the time, tuition collection went on silently and invisibly through the mail and the business office.
At Providence-St. Mel, the monthly collection of tuition is a major public event that affects everyone. Teachers, in particular, are involved because they have to send students down to the office at the end of the day if their tuition hasn`t been paid. There is a fine for late tuition, and students aren`t allowed back in school until the tuition and fine are paid. I was missing two students this morning in class.
The amazing thing is that the parents and relatives will pay $1.2 million this year in tuition, fees, fines and required fundraising for the education of the 540 students in the school. It will cost just about $2 million to run the school, and my job is to raise the remaining $800,000-or about $1,500 per student-plus more than $200,000 in scholarships. I am certain that the parents can`t give any more than they do now. If the parents at Parker gave the same percentage of their disposable income in a single year, Parker would probably never have to raise money ever again.
