Eisenhower High School Principal Kevin Burns is happily patrolling the halls of his domain.
It is lunchtime here at Eisenhower, the public high school in Blue Island, and the halls are filled with students clanging their lockers and toting books on their way to lunch, which is cheeseburgers and fries today.
Burns–a massively built maple tree of a man with red hair and a baby face that belies his 43 years–has a jocular word for nearly everyone he meets. He grabs one youth by the T-shirt and delivers an impromptu lecture, right there in the hallway: “Hey I got news here, I heard things weren’t going so well. . . .” He greets two National Honor Society inductees with the congratulations of a proud papa. Another student stops him to ask worriedly about graduation requirements. Two juniors come careening down the way at full speed, and he blocks their path like a crossing guard. “Whoa, whoa! Slow down!” he says, holding out his hand.
“The kids enjoy being here,” Burns says. He shows off the school store–hung with red Cardinal sweatshirts and other school paraphernalia for sale–the cafeteria and the gym, where students have just finished a lesson in rappelling. “They feel safe here, and the building looks good.”
Ask if metal detectors play a role in the school’s security and Burns gives a good-natured snort. “Metal detectors? This is a nice school,” he chides.
The joie de vivre apparent in Eisenhower’s noisy halls–a “nice school” feeling that has been playing a part in convincing many a Blue Island parent of late to send their children here instead of private schools–was not always thus. Plagued by racial tension in the late 1960s and early ’70s and plummeting academic performance during the ’80s, Eisenhower is a school with a checkered past that it has only recently begun to live down.
“The old image of Eisenhower was of a school that was just barely hanging on,” explains Jim Tate, the school board vice president for District 218, which also includes Richards and Polaris High Schools in Oak Lawn, Shepard High School in Palos Heights, Summit Learning Center in Robbins and ASPEN High School in Crestwood. “Now when people bring up the name of the school in the community, it is no longer with disdain or suspicion.”
A hand-painted poster on a school wall reads “Renaissance is for you.” It refers to an incentive program, introduced in the 1994-95 school year at Eisenhower, in which students who receive good conduct and performance points are rewarded with coupons good for discounts at area merchants. But renaissance also is exactly what Eisenhower has undergone these last half-dozen years.
Community leaders, teachers and students can point to any number of changes and new programs that have been launched at the school with positive effect. Fireworks at the homecoming football game? That’s new. A multicultural program to promote teacher and student sensitivity? New, too. So is Burns’ most cherished project–a flourishing scholarship fund backed by local businesses.
“There has been a return of pride both by the staff and by the students and by the community,” says Tate. “There’s a renewed interest and a renewed pride in the school.”
Students, for the most part, agree. “People here in my home town, the nervous people around town, think it’s a bad school,” says Jason Sullivan, 17, a recent graduate and student leader. “But (students) all get along, even the ones from different racial backgrounds. School spirit has definitely picked up around here.”
So what explains the changes going on at Eisenhower these days? Local officials think they’re doing a better job of emphasizing the school’s successes to the media, for one. And although most officials admit a gang problem exists in the community, as it does in many Chicago suburbs, District 218 has cracked down on disciplinary problems, taking a hard line on students who wear gang colors, are known to participate in gangs or are chronically truant. Teachers at Eisenhower are personally monitoring the attendance of some students.
Much of Eisenhower’s recent success, many note, is due to Burns, known as an enthusiastic motivator by his peers and a fair but tough disciplinarian among students.
“People feel good when their efforts are appreciated,” says Burns, who has served as principal for two years. “I make a point to tell them `thanks.’ “
“Since Kevin Burns has come, there has been a new life, a new energy to Eisenhower High School,” says Sam Rizzo, the superintendent of Atwood Heights Elementary School District 125, which includes Alsip’s Hamlin Upper Grade Center, whose students go on to Eisenhower. “Nobody does it (alone), but who is pulling all of these people together, leading them in the right direction? The building principal.”
Rizzo noted that Burns took the step this year of sponsoring an academic quiz bowl with local elementary and middle schoolers who would eventually become Eisenhower students, so they could begin the process of getting to know each other and their future high school.
The school has been a presence in one form or another in Blue Island for nearly 100 years, first as Worth Township School, founded in 1896, and later as Blue Island Community School. In 1950, when the new building was constructed, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower himself came to the dedication.
In the 1960s, enrollment levels peaked, and so did racial tensions at the school. More than 100 students were suspended during one ugly spate of rioting.
“Those were bad years,” remembers Jack Kenney, a business teacher at the school for 28 years. “There was always stress and conflict and tension among the kids. I remember once I had a day off and came in the next day and there were hardly any cars in the parking lot and no students. There had been some kind of protest or walkout.”
These days, the ethnically diverse student population–a fairly equal mix of 40 percent white students, 30 percent black and 30 percent Hispanic–co-exist in relative harmony, in part thanks to changing times and a multicultural sensitivity program for teachers and students begun at the school in 1993.
Academically, the school began to decline in the 1980s, and in 1987 its 14.5 average on the American College Test ranked it among the bottom 4 percent of all high schools nationally. “We have a growing percentage of kids taking the ACT who have no business taking it at all,” the then-principal groused to the Tribune. “But they do take it, and we get penalized for it.”
This kind of attitude seems light years from the message put forth by students, teachers and administration officials today at Eisenhower, where the average ACT registered at an unremarkable, but at least not dismal, 19.4 in the ’94-95 school year. Burns is thrilled to note that 34 percent of the 1,250 students at Eisenhower enrolled in the program for the college bound last year, as opposed to 26 percent the previous year. And children who might otherwise have taken the parochial high school route are going to their local public school.
Don Peloquin, Blue Island’s mayor and a member of Eisenhower’s class of ’68, sent his sons Danny, who graduated June 6, and Dave, who just finished his freshman year, to Eisenhower because of the school’s changing reputation and ethnically diverse student body. “We’re Catholic, so at first I thought I’d send (Danny) to a Catholic high school,” Peloquin says. “But we just felt the environment where he could learn to be with a diverse group of people would be beneficial in the long run.”
For other Catholic parents, the decision to send their kids to Eisenhower remains an economic one. “Eisenhower still has a lot of problems,” says Richard Poncinie, a Blue Island machinist who has sent three children through Eisenhower because of the cost of private schools. “Their graduation rate is still at around 75 percent. But for our kids it has been great. There are small classes there, and they get a lot of individual attention.”
Since Burns’ arrival, the graduation rate has increased from 66 percent to 75 percent. The dropout rate has declined from 11 percent to 6 percent, and the truancy rate also has decreased.
A former associate principal at Richards High School in Oak Lawn from 1992 to 1994, Burns made his way back to Eisenhower as principal in 1994. (He had served as assistant principal there from 1988-90.) A South Side native, he attended St. Xavier College in Chicago for undergraduate work and received a master’s degree from Loyola University in 1979. He’ll receive a doctorate in educational administration from Loyola later this year.
His philosophy is simple. “Challenge people,” Burns says. “I have high expectations and have always been a goal setter.”
He’s the kind of person who keeps a list of his goals tucked away somewhere, and the day’s list goes on a well-used and annotated index card in his pocket for easy retrieval.
Chief among his goals since his arrival was increasing the amount of college scholarship money received by graduating Eisenhower seniors, because a high percentage of students–about 33 percent–qualify as low income by state standards. He has been successful in that, in part because he and his staff constantly hound the students about completing their financial aid forms and scholarship applications. Eisenhower’s Class of ’96, which graduated Thursday, won $2.5 million in academic scholarships, up from $300,000 in 1993.
His pet project is the school-sponsored scholarship fund. During the last two years he has–by knocking on doors at businesses all over the area–plumped its coffers five-fold, to $30,000. “I just go and ask them,” Burns says simply. “Nobody says no to me. It’s that Irish face.”
In May 1995, when a toxic particulate emission from nearby Clark Refining and Marketing Inc. befouled the school’s ventilation system and sent 54 Eisenhower students and staffers to the hospital, Burns, working with Clark officials, even managed to turn that disaster around. Along with implementing an air-quality testing program in the science classes and other safety measures, Burns eventually wrangled from Clark a pledge of $12,000 annually for the scholarship fund and some summer jobs for talented science students.
Ron Snook, environmental manager at Clark, said the company established a better working relationship with the school after the high-profile, and very tense, incident.
“Currently, I believe we’ve got a very good relationship. We communicate with them once a week,” Snook says. After that emergency, he says, Clark installed hot line phones from the refinery directly to the school. Donating to the school’s scholarship fund, Snook says, “is our way of being good neighbors.”
Business teacher Jack Kenney gives Burns credit for such changes. “(Burns) is definitely a real motivating force and a positive force in school here,” says Kenney. “Scholarships are on the top of his list.”
The change is palpable. “I think I see the kids a little more goal oriented,” Kenney says. “Kids would always say they wanted to go to college, and now they’re doing something about it, by taking college prep or business classes or finding some type of part-time job that fits into what they want to be.”
To that end, Kenney and the rest of the business staff began two years ago to get up at the groggy hour of 5:30 a.m. every Friday– without pay!–to bake and sell cookies to the students for their own scholarship fund contribution, estimated at $3,000 this year.
The business teachers who get up early to sell cookies, the two math teachers who tutor on their off-hours free of charge, the band instructor who took a busload of students on a tour of black colleges in the South–these are all examples, Burns says, of staffers going the extra distance for the students. “If you ask for help, people will respond,” he says simply.
“A lot of things that happen in this school happen because of (people) coming together.”
