“It takes a whole village to raise a child.”
Carol Rancifer Gearring uses this widely known African proverb to describe the nurturing provided by the South Side community of Altgeld Gardens during her childhood in the 1950s.
Gearring, a 28-year veteran of the Chicago Public Schools system, always has viewed teaching as a way to give something back to her neighborhood.
She now directs an innovative program that helps students from that neighborhood ge growing up, Gearring says, community activity revolved around George Washington Carver Area High School and two or three churches. Everyone knew everyone else and most residents were actively involved in their neighbors’ lives.
It was in this stable, almost insular environment, enhanced by the intellectual stimulation provided by her mother and twice-weekly classes at the School of the Art Institute, where she had a scholarship, that Gearring thrived during her teen years.
Two high school English teachers, Dorothy Camille Richie and June P. Owens, in particular inspired her. Gearring says they were articulate and professional. They cared passionately about their students and seemed to have “an inexhaustible wealth of knowledge to share,” she says. Gearring caught their enthusiasm and decided to follow in their footsteps. She became an English teacher in 1964 and has served the community ever since.
Although Gearring returned to Carver in 1963 for her year of student teaching, she had intended to begin her career at Calumet High School because it was close to where she was then living. An invitation from the principal of Carver changed her plans.
“I didn’t think about how far I would have to travel,” Gearring says, laughing. “I was touched that the principal would go to the trouble of asking me back. He said he thought I would be a wonderful role model for the students,” she says.
Gearring soon discovered how insulated her students were. “I had so many students who had never ventured outside the Altgeld community, and I feared they would never make it in the real world,” she says. “So it became my mission to help them move forward and break these boundaries to reach new horizons.”
After her first four years as a Carver teacher, she was appointed to guidance and counseling in 1968. “It was heart-rending,” she recalls. “I had taught some of these same students English, and now I was hearing more about their personal lives than I felt able to handle. There were so many things I couldn’t change for them, though Lord knows I wanted to desperately.”
Because many students had after-school jobs and other conflicts, Gearring piled her files onto a cart and swung through the school cafeteria at lunchtime.
She had informal meetings at the back of the room, helping students complete their college applications.
“Becoming so personally involved with my students and focusing on what would happen to them after graduation just crystallized everything for me,” says Gearring, 51. “Going to college was something that was expected in my family, and I wanted these children to have that same expectation. I valued it so much that I think I just pushed it onto them.”
She wrote scores of recommendation letters that first year, and 129 out of 137 students left for college in the fall of 1968.
In 1980, she created the innovative Project Challenge, which she still directs. She describes it as “an acceleration and enrichment program for academically motivated minority and disadvantaged students.” It is a successful cooperative venture between Chicago State University and Carver High.
Students from grades 9 through 12 are selected for the program on the basis of academic and attitudinal criteria. They are enrolled in two 60-minute periods of English and math at the university five mornings a week, followed by a group discussion. They then return by bus to Carver, attending high school classes in the afternoon.
“I had been formulating the idea of a special transition program like this for a very long time,” Gearring says.
Gearring had the clear advantage of understanding the realities of life inside and outside the Altgeld community. “Growing up, I had the best of both worlds,” she says. “The world of Altgeld was so self-contained that it was easy to become isolated. . . . I had been exposed to all kinds of people from all ethnic backgrounds, and I just expected to do anything I wanted and go anywhere I chose.”
Her childhood did not prepare her for her first taste of racism, encountered in 1960 when she was a freshman at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. For days she tried to find off-campus housing, and naively attributed the refusals to the record number of incoming students that year. After meeting two white women who recommended a place they had found, she called and was warmly welcomed. When she arrived, the landlady told her she had rented the last room to another student just 10 minutes earlier.
“It was epiphany right then and there,” Gearring says. “All this time, I had thought my not finding accommodation was just coincidence. Now here I was, 360 miles from home, with nowhere to stay and no real friends.”
Thanks to her liberal upbringing, she says, she had always considered herself totally prepared for anything the world could hand her. “Yet I was not prepared for this,” she says. “Once I knew the truth, I felt so hurt and so angry. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I started running as fast as I could with no purpose or destination, running just to get away and have it all be over, like a bad dream.”
Gearring finally found housing in the black part of town through the local Baptist Foundation, but segregation was a difficult adjustment.
Gearring thinks the housing incident made her stronger and more decisive. It also convinced her of the necessity of taking steps to right injustice, wherever it might occur, she says.
In her teaching, she highlights experiences such as this to show students the importance of making sound decisions about where they want to go in life. She tries to give them the tools they need to get there, always exhorting them to give back to the community.
Numerous awards adorn a wall in the hallway of the Hyde Park home Gearring shares with her husband, Joel, and two sons, Joel “Rance,” 22, and Tim, 15. Her most cherished memento is the plaque she received from the first homeroom students she taught and counseled in 1964-68, inscribed “Teacher and Mother of the Year.”
“I know it probably sounds hard to believe,” she says, “but there’s absolutely nothing about my work that I dislike. I just love teaching. I don’t understand teachers who say they have problems with their students. These children are crying out for anything that makes them feel successful, in even the smallest ways.”
In May she was presented with a Kohl International Teaching Award by the Dolores Kohl Education Foundation of Wilmette. Dolores Kohl Solovy, foundation president, says Gearring “is one of those rare people who can go out and really touch the lives of children.”
At the Kohl awards ceremony at Hotel Nikko, Gearring was thrilled to discover that the head doorman, Ed Reese, was a former afternoon reading student. She recalls the excitement of the day: “Eddie threw his arms around me and said, `Miss G., when I heard about the awards, I told my staff I had had a high school teacher who deserved to win-and here you are!’ It was an emotional moment for us both.”
Gearring says she enjoys the challenge offered by teaching two diverse student groups. “I could have only gifted and accelerated students all day if I preferred,” she says. “But I don’t think it’s fair to the children who really need the most.”
She believes in working within her students’ capabilities, saying, “All plants don’t grow at the same speed; children are exactly the same way.”
She began to focus on remedial reading after one student could not maintain his grades because he had such difficulty reading. She studied everything she could find about reading. She then wrote a proposal for a reading lab because she knew other students had similar problems.
In 1971 Gearring collaborated on a proposal for a state-funded program for gifted students. She administered the program, in which students from several high schools took classes at the University of Chicago two days a week. Gearring says she was not entirely happy with the program because she wanted the students to have more exposure to the college campus and because they missed regular classes at their schools and were unable to participate in school sports and other extracurricular activities. But this program was the precursor to Project Challenge.
When money for the program ran out in 1980, Gearring’s dream quickly became reality. She submitted her proposal for Project Challenge. It started with three seniors, for whom Chicago State University provided instructors, classroom space and an office. Since then, with a combination of state and private money, more than 200 students have completed the program.
Almost all have gone on to college, says Leonard E. Etlinger, dean of continuing education and Project Challenge adviser at Chicago State.
“Nothing like this had ever been done before,” Gearring says. “It took (the University of Chicago program) one step further. I wanted to ensure that the students would feel so good about being on a college campus that it would be a natural transition to graduate from Carver and go on to a full-fledged university. I wanted to preserve intact the children’s high school experience, yet allow them to fully taste the college experience as well.”
Project Challenge recruits students from Chicago’s South Side elementary schools. For an information packet, call 312-995-2215.
