A new school but really just the same old same old

I was young teacher on Chicago’s Westside. It was early October, the school year was a few weeks old, but already everybody, students and teachers alike, were getting into the swing of things.
Latoya use to come and visit me on my hall guard post on the school’s lower level. She was suppose to be someplace else-maybe lunch where she didn’t fit in, in study where she didn’t know how to study, or maybe in class where she’d be in over her head. I probably should have turned her in for cutting.
Our school was Orr Academy. It had just been open a few weeks, a brand new building. The previous spring, while the students were still in the old building, the administration had asked the students to vote on a new name for the new school. Their first choice—an absolutely perfect name –was Mark Clark and Fred Hampton Academy. Clark and Hampton had been two Black Panthers gunned down in their beds by the Cook County State’s Attorney police on orders from John Mitchell, US Attorney General in the Nixon Administration. And kids, being kids, their second choice was General George Patton, the hero of a recently released Hollywood movie. The school board named the school Orr after a turn of the Twentieth Century white Pennselvyian, streetcar conductor and union organizer.
The school was originally going to be build north of Chicago Ave. which at the time was the line dividing black and whites. The land had been purchased and the homes torn down. Everything was all set. Then one day the Alderman happened to visit the old school. It was nearly all black. He couldn’t have a mostly black school in a white neighborhood in his ward. The site was moved south of the line. Sound strange? No that was business as usual. A few years later the alderman, a favorite crony of the mayor would go to jail for corruption.
The school was on the corner of Chicago and Pulaski Avenues. As far as the students knew, it had always been Pulaski Ave. But in the 1930s, the street’s name had been changed from Crawford Ave. to Pulaski (to curry favored with the growing number of Polish voters) and for years people fought over the name change. Some Chicagoans were never going to accept the idea that a street was going to be named after a Polish person even though he had fought in the American Revolutionary War. For over twenty years, they fought back and forth in the courts and finally the courts upheld the name change. Ironically in a few years, when Dr. King’s birthday was made a national holiday and some whites felt that they needed another holiday, a white holiday, and Pulaski who now had a large enough following was honored with a holiday to make sure the blacks did not get one up on whites.
Latoya came to visit almost every day. I provided her with a refuge for a half hour or so. Latoya didn’t know, the other kids didn’t know, but if she ever had a future she would be beautiful. But she hadn’t bloomed yet. She was still just a kind of cute, shy, quite, awkward fifteen year old in a school where she didn’t have a clue and couldn’t possibly succeed.
The last time she came, she talked. She just didn’t answer my questions about school, home and her neighborhood. She talked because she had something on her mind. She said,” You know, this brand new building. We all looked forward to coming here, all last year and all last summer, we just couldn‘t wait for school to start in the new building.” And then she stopped and looked away and then as she looked down she continued, “You know, it’s just the same as our old school—just exactly the same—no different. Just like every other school I’ve ever gone to”
She was in pre-algebra and didn’t know her tables, she was in world geography and wasn’t sure how to get downtown. Her books were especially chosen for students like her. They were high school texts “watered down”, “dumbed down” as some of her teachers said. The teachers bragged that they had picked the perfect books, the reading level was seventh grade, but with ninth grade content. She had a fifth grade reading level, no study skills, no one had ever read to her, she had never heard of the Cat in the Hat, It was 1973, adults were just beginning to discover black lit., she probably never hear of Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes or Gordon Parks. Nobody had ever taken the time to read to her, to read with her, to help her pick books that she’d be interested in. She couldn’t possibly do regular school work or follow the regular routine.
Naively, I tried to tell her that it wasn’t all bad. I told her that there were good teachers at Orr who would be happy to work with her. She had good, well meaning teachers and she had to give them a chance, she had friends from the neighborhood, it wasn’t as bad as she thought. She could stick it out.
As I was giving my little speech, I knew it wasn’t working and it didn’t work. I never saw her again. There were a thousand freshmen in the brand new building that fall; next fall there would only be five hundred sophomores.
And—she was right; the new building was just like every other building.