It is a suburb that most people can’t wait to leave.
“Everyone wants to get out if they can,” admits Ford Heights Mayor Sillierine Bennett. “No one wants to be poor and no one wants to be uneducated.”
A staggering majority of her constituents are both.
Ford Heights’ median household income–$8,930–is among the lowest in Cook County. Two-thirds of the families live in public housing. Nearly 96 percent of the children in the south suburb’s ailing schools live in poverty. And less than 1 percent of its residents–39 of 4,259–had a bachelor’s degree as of the 1990 Census.
“Historically, not a lot of our students have gone on to college,” says Ford Heights Elementary School District Supt. Willie Davis. More than half never make it through high school.
The few who do manage to get a college degree have little reason to stay in Ford Heights, labeled “America’s poorest suburb” in a well-publicized 1992 study by urbanologist Pierre deVise. Thirty miles from Chicago, the town has all the afflictions of an inner-city slum–violence, teenage pregnancy, chronic unemployment and rampant drug abuse–compounded by the isolation and the paucity of services typically found only in the most rural of communities. There is no grocery store, no bank, no library, no park district. And no industry, other than a tire recycling plant that employs fewer than 50 of the town’s residents.
But amid the despair, there are signs of hope in Ford Heights: The crumbling community center is being renovated, a new water system is on the way, a gleaming health clinic is complete, the notoriously corrupt police force has been ousted and replaced.
And Nyree Ford came back to town after she graduated from Governors State University in 1998.
“I could have moved. I could go anywhere I want to go, but I want to be here. This is where my heart is,” says Ford, perched on a metal chair in the community center that houses the closet-size office of Learning in Context Partnership.
Ford is the first graduate of the LIC program, which five years ago began offering Ford Heights residents between the ages of 17 and 25 a free college education at nearby Prairie State College and Governors State University. Now 27 and a single mother, Ford works as an LIC assistant program director, helping her neighbors follow the same road to college she took.
She serves as a tough but empathetic mentor to young students struggling to overcome the obstacles that poverty can put in the way of educational success. And perhaps more important to a community trying to build a better life for its residents, she is living proof that hard work in school can pay off in the real world.
“We were fortunate to get Nyree to come back to the village,” Davis says. “When we first started the program, we didn’t have a Nyree Ford to point to and say, ‘She did it, so can you.’ “
That was in 1995, when then-Governors State President Paula Wolff first made the offer of a free college education to the struggling suburb. “This was a two-way street,” says Wolff, who resigned last spring. By providing a free education to students from Ford Heights, the two-year university could boost minority enrollment on its promise to serve surrounding communities. Wolff enlisted the support of Prairie State College, a junior college in Chicago Heights. “The idea was for the students to start at Prairie State and then continue on to Governors State,” she says.
The offer of free college, however, would be irrelevant if Ford Heights students couldn’t graduate from high school. So, aside from assuming the cost of tuition, the colleges pledged academic support–tutoring, mentoring and cultural enrichment–to students at Ford Heights’ Cottage Grove Middle School and Bloom Trail High School, two troubled schools that had consistently fallen far below the statewide averages on the Illinois Goals Achievement Program.
By targeting Ford Heights, a small community with extremely low graduation rates, Wolff hoped to make a significant impact in a relatively short time. Five years may not be long enough to fairly judge whether the program has done that, but some early numbers suggest where it is working and where it is not.
So far, nine students in the program have graduated from Governors State. Three went on to get master’s degrees; another is at Harvard Medical School. Other graduates include a computer programmer at Lucent Technologies; an assistant to the new Governors State president, Stuart Fagan; and a field inspector for the Illinois Department of Human Services. Seven more Ford Heights students enrolled at Governors State last fall.
At Prairie State, enrollment from Ford Heights has more than doubled, to 47, since the LIC program began.
“The numbers may be small in an absolute sense, but they are significant,” says Fagan. “You have to understand that we had almost no graduates from Ford Heights in previous years.”
Perhaps an even better measure of the program’s impact is that only five students have dropped out of Prairie State, and three of those five later returned to complete their degrees. At Governors State, the only Learning in Context students who left the university without degrees transferred to other colleges.
“Where the program has really excelled is in ensuring that the students who go to Prairie State succeed there and then come here and graduate,” says Governors State English and secondary education professor Patricia Koutouzos, who supplies student teachers to work with Ford Heights children. “Involving the kids in the program and keeping them in [high] school, that’s where the struggle is.”
Indeed, of the 50 Ford Heights seniors at Bloom Trail High School last year, only 19 joined the Learning in Context program. While those who did overwhelmingly went on to college–13 registered for classes at Prairie State this fall and four enrolled at other universities–the future hasn’t changed much for most of the impoverished village’s youth.
“The majority of my peers work or they have babies, and they just think of college last,” says Nisan Coulter, a Governors State junior from Ford Heights.
That’s where Nyree Ford and her colleagues come in. Their job, Fagan says, is to change the mindset of a community where few people have gone to college. “It requires showing people there . . . that college is manageable, and it’s difficult to get that across to parents who haven’t had that experience.”
That Nyree Ford’s mother attended college, albeit briefly, played a key role in her daughter’s academic achievement. “Education was always the focal point for my mom,” Nyree Ford says. “She wanted her children to do better and be better than herself.”
From the moment Nyree Ford set foot in kindergarten, it was clear to her that school was a place where she could shine. “I wasn’t good at any sports so I guess I had to be good at something,” she says. “I really excelled when it came to reading comprehension and writing.”
In fact, Ford said, there wasn’t much about school she didn’t like. She even looked forward to report cards. “You’d feel so good when you see that report card,” Ford recalled. “All that hard work and stress paid off.”
When she was 10, her parents divorced and Nyree and her older brother and sister moved to public housing with their mother, and their father moved to Virginia. Through the years, Everleaner Ford Mannery strove to keep her children on the right path.
“I know it had to be hard to go through a divorce and have three children and still make it look like everything was OK, but she did,” Ford said. “I never felt like I lacked anything or like, `Now that I’m moving from a house into public housing, I’m nothing.’ She always told me, `You’re going to be somebody.’ “
“Nyree always seemed a little bit special, a little bit different than most children,” says Ford Mannery, a warm woman whose voice still bears traces of her Tennessee childhood. She scraped enough together from her job as a social service aid at the Cook County Housing Authority to send her daughter to Prairie State College for a year. Just when the money ran out, a classmate told Ford about the new LIC program that could waive her tuition. “Learning in Context was a godsend,” Ford Mannery says.
But even with her enthusiasm for school and a supportive family, Nyree Ford struggled as a college student. “There were times when college got so hard, I told my mother I wanted to quit,” she recalls. But each time, Everleaner Ford Mannery told her daughter, “I already bought my hat and dress–you’re graduating.”
Now Ford offers a similar kind of steely encouragement to Prairie State’s incoming freshmen. When she spoke at the program’s orientation in September, clad in a flannel shirt and blue jeans, her long hair pulled back in a ponytail, Ford could have passed for a freshman herself. But there was no mistaking the authority in her voice.
“What we expect of you is to maintain a GPA of 2.0,” she said, leveling her eyes sternly at each student seated around the conference table. “Otherwise, you are in danger of being booted out of the program.”
She let that sink in, then went on in a slightly gentler tone. “We know some of you are parents,” she said, as her own 15-month-old daughter, Diamond, bounced on the lap of one of the freshmen. “You work full-time, you have pressures, but when you have a problem, you need to keep the lines of communication open. We want you to flourish.”
At Prairie State, each LIC student is assigned an adviser, and professors are supposed to notify the adviser if the student is in danger of slipping below a 2.0, the grade requirement for the free tuition program. The students also are eligible for free tutoring. “I’d say at least 60 percent of them take advantage of the tutoring,” says Debra Wafford, LIC coordinator at Prairie State, who teams students with tutors and consults with professors when a student is in danger of failing.
She and Ford also help with non-academic problems. They have organized carpools for students who can’t find reliable transportation to class, and help many of the program’s young mothers–80 percent of the students are female–find day care. Twice a month, Ford meets individually with all the Learning in Context students at Prairie State and Governors State to make sure no one is heading for trouble. As the numbers attest, few of these students will fail.
But so far, the offer of a free college education has not motivated many Ford Heights students to join the LIC program, which is no surprise to educators who have studied similar efforts. Without an adult they respect pushing them, most kids won’t make a sustained effort to do well in school, says Joseph Kahne, a former associate professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
In a two-year study published last year, Kahne evaluated the impact of college-incentive programs funded by the I Have a Dream Foundation in two inner-city Chicago schools. “A clear finding from our study is that the promise of a college education was an insufficient motivator for the vast majority of kids,” Kahne says. On the other hand, “If you can establish and maintain supportive relationships with kids over the long term, the reality is that these kids have enormous potential,” says Kahne, now an associate professor of education at Mills College in Oakland, Calif.
Joshua Elmore, 17, was a 6th-grader at Cottage Grove Middle School when he joined the LIC program. “It was something for me to do after school that was positive,” says Elmore, now a senior at Bloom Trail.
Along the way, LIC counselors have helped him get summer jobs, pass algebra and glimpse life beyond Ford Heights. “We went on a lot of field trips,” he recalls, and whether the bus was going to the Field Museum, a dance performance or even to St. Louis, he was always on board.
He already has his application in to Prairie State and plans to major in criminal law. “I stuck with it because it was fun,” he says. “I liked the people there, liked talking to them.”
Gary Orfield, a Harvard education and social policy professor, agrees that such relationships are vital to educational success, especially when other influences can be negative. “Basically, the things that affect a kid’s future are his family, his peer group, his neighborhood, what his school has to offer, what kind of support networks there are–and whether there are role models that show the effect of persisting,” Orfield says. “In a really poor, isolated community like Ford Heights, all those things are stacked against a kid, independent of his own talent and aspirations.”
Learning in Context’s annual budget of $105,000–a grant from the Illinois Department of Higher Education–barely covers salaries for a staff of three. In past years, the program was supplemented by about $40,000 in private funds, but university officials say those sources have dried up. For now, it’s up to LIC Director Ernestine Beck-Fulgham and her two assistants, Ford and April Harper, to try to reach more than 400 Ford Heights students who attend Cottage Grove Middle School and Bloom Trail High School–a task Kahne believes is impossible.
“The problem with doing this on a large scale with very little personnel is that you’re not going to build strong relationships, and that will knock most kids out of the game,” Kahne says. “You’re not going to reach the really marginal students.”
Many educators argue that the best way to reach these students is to break up large schools into smaller ones, enabling teachers to establish personal connections with each student. Melissa Roderick, associate professor of the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, has studied Chicago’s high schools in her role as director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research. She says she is convinced that well-intentioned programs like LIC or I Have a Dream can have only limited success as long as students are stuck in “horrendously bad” high schools.
“As soon as you get into communities of kids who are struggling, you need very small schools,” Roderick said. “Small is so important for urban kids who get lost in every crack possible.”
Roderick is on the board of a small charter high school, North Lawndale College Prep in Chicago, which places a premium on establishing meaningful relationships between students and teachers. “The kids who go there have very few skills coming in,” she says. “When they don’t show up at school one day, someone is going to call them and say, ‘Where were you? What’s wrong? Are you coming tomorrow?’ And it makes a major difference. I don’t think I know of a child who’s dropped out” since the school opened three years ago.
Even with the shortcomings evident at Bloom Trail High School and Cottage Grove Middle School, LIC Director Beck-Fulgham believes that, by relying on parents and teachers to help, the program is able to make a significant difference in the lives of many Ford Heights children.
But Kahne is skeptical, saying it is “a really steep challenge” to get more than passive support from parents in such communities. “Many of these parents have had bad experiences with public schools themselves,” he says, and relying on them to push their kids to take part in the program rarely works.
That has been the experience of school administrators in Ford Heights. At Cottage Grove Middle School, where two-thirds of the 240 students read below their grade level, only a few were attending the after-school tutoring arranged through the LIC program. Cottage Grove principal Jacqueline Scott has tried to convince parents that tutoring can make a difference in their children’s grades, but for many, just getting their children to school is an achievement.
“About 80 to 85 percent of our kids are in single-family homes headed by females, and there are a lot of things going on at home,” says Scott, who had spent the afternoon trying to track down the mother of a child who was in danger of being ejected from school because his immunizations were out of date. “It seems like everybody’s caught up in this drug epidemic,” she lamented. “I can’t locate his mother, and even if I do, she won’t go over to the health clinic and sign for him. I know if I send him home he’ll never come back.”
Attendance at tutoring sessions was so low last year, Governors State threatened to withdraw its student teachers from Cottage Grove. A compromise was reached in which Governors State students will tutor kids at Cottage Grove during regular class periods. “We now know that’s the most successful way to do it,” Beck-Fulgham says.
At Bloom Trail, after-school tutoring is the only option, so the decision to show up is largely left to the students, and attendance remains spotty. “I write notes to staff and notes to counselors and make them aware of the tutorials,” sighed Bloom Trail assistant principal Glen Giannetti. “Some days are good and some days could be better.”
On a recent afternoon, student teachers from Governors State gathered in the high school’s library for a tutoring session, but just a smattering of students showed up. Harper went down the hall to round up kids from detention. “Parents just don’t care these days,” Harper fumed. She managed to find enough students to pair up with tutors, but only three were from Ford Heights.
“They have teenage pregnancy, substance abuse,” Ford said of the difficulties Bloom Trail students face. “There’s peer pressure and gangs, people who think it’s not cool to be a smart person.”
Having grown up in Ford Heights, Nyree Ford is convinced that most parents in the town want the same things for their children that all parents do and that there are plenty of families headed by strong role models, like her own mother and 49-year-old Annie Coulter, mother of seven. Coulter was among the first to join LIC’s parent association.
“When they hollered free college, I said, ‘Where do I sign up?’ ” says Coulter, whose daughter Nisan is a junior at Governors State. Her younger daughter, Annelle, is one of the few Ford Heights students at Bloom Trail who regularly attend tutoring.
Coulter, who is pursuing her own BA at Governors State–she wants to be a drug counselor–recruits the young mothers she meets through her job as a teacher’s assistant at the local Head Start preschool program. “There are a lot of young parents there who could take advantage of the program themselves,” Coulter says.
Nyree Ford also works her hometown connections to persuade more Ford Heights parents that it’s up to them to provide the motivation for their children. “This is a small place,” Ford says. “Everything here spreads by word of mouth, and who better to reach the community than a resident of Ford Heights?” She attends every parent night at Cottage Grove and she organized the Christmas party the program hosts for the community each year.
When Ford graduated from Governors State in 1998, she was the student commencement speaker. Her mother had elegant announcements printed up on cream-colored paper and sent them to all her relatives and friends. “She is the first person in my family to graduate from college,” says Ford Mannery, who will soon be the second. She is scheduled to graduate from Governors State next June with a bachelor’s degree in psychology.
Turning to a page in the scrapbook she keeps of her daughter’s academic career, Ford Mannery showed off Ford’s graduation photograph. Next to the picture of the young woman in cap and gown is a copy of the speech Ford gave that day:
“Many would have you believe that because you are a product of Ford Heights, your road in life won’t go very far. I stand before you as proof that it will. I implore you to excel, not in spite of where you come from, but because of it. You can make it if you desire.”
“I know all those people there didn’t know my baby,” Ford Mannery says softly. “But when she finished, they gave her a standing ovation.”
