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player ready...North Chicago, a city long used to living with an undercurrent of distress about its schools, began to confront life without them Wednesday.
Although people here are used to doing without when it comes to education-without enough books, desks, copy paper, even toilet paper-the first day of the first teacher strike in nearly a decade extended that concept to dimensions nearing hyperbole.
Resolve turned up in some of the most private and public places. At home, some parents became makeshift teachers, giving lessons to children at the kitchen table. At one school, the U.S. Postal Service became involved in the strike, when the mail carrier refused to cross the picket line.
Children seemed misfits on this fall morning, suddenly flush with time enough to rake leaves, play basketball and get haircuts. Teachers, too, seemed out of place, trying to make a point outside the schools, not inside. “Negotiate so we can educate,” they chanted. Instead of passing out assignments, they were handing out “scab lists.”
Eerily, school bells continued to ring through it all, heralding the coming and going of a school day that wasn’t.
One-day day care
About 14 children colored drawings of leaves and queens as they sat around tables inside the Foss Park District community center on Lewis Avenue. At the center, before-and after-school day care had been converted into a full-day affair-though only for one day.
All but one of the students said they wished they were in school. Some spoke of a missed field trip to a zoo. One boy said he was supposed to do a science project Wednesday.
The children offered widely varied perceptions of why their schools were closed.
“They want to have a strike so they can have fun and parties,” said Adrenn Peyton, 7, a Forrestal 2nd grader. “We have to go to day care while our parents work.”
“I think it’s wrong,” said Capresha Harris, 8, a 3rd grader at Green Bay Elementary School. “I think the teachers don’t care about us learning because they already learned when they was little.”
Forrestal Elementary 2nd grader Brandy Johnson, 7, said the teachers were on strike “because they did something wrong.”
Parents were handed notes Wednesday afternoon declaring that the center could not afford to continue daylong care during the strike.
“They’re going to have to make other arrangements,” said Assistant Director Tony Franklin. “We really don’t have the money to staff this thing all day.”
On the picket line
Dawn arrived cold and damp. Picketing teachers all over North Chicago hugged their anger to keep warm. The early morning sun was covered by clouds, but the bright lights of television cameras shone on them.
About 30 teachers patrolled the sidewalks around North Chicago High School, stopping at times to hug students who showed up at school like gapers at a car accident.
Students gathered in tight knots on the sidewalk to bemoan missed lessons, football games, speech tournaments and to offer support to favorite teachers.
Teachers said they worry about “their” kids if the strike continues.
“It’s awful being out here,” said Carol Selgrad, a speech pathologist at South Elementary School, “We want to be in school with our kids, but we’re treated like furniture and so are our kids.”
Publicly, teachers talked of the issues that brought them here-pay and benefits, limited teaching supplies and a resentment of the administration’s spending choices.
Privately, some teachers worried about the future of their jobs.
High school Principal James Dew, meanwhile, was philosophical about the strike’s first day.
“It’s part of the democratic process,” he said. “There’s a tremendous social studies lesson in all of this.”
Home becomes school
Mary Pleaugh, the mother of three boys, this week became their teacher. The family townhouse became a makeshift version of Marjorie P. Hart School.
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Pleaugh gathered her sons at the dining room table. Kevin, 9, and Philip, 8, worked on their favorite subject, math, while 6-year-old Matthew tried to think of how to use new words in a sentence.
But even as early on as Wednesday, thoughts of a prolonged strike were wearing the optimism of the PTA volunteer a little thin.
“I’m not equipped to do all that they do in school,” said Pleaugh, who works as a stocker at Venture. “The kids are going to get out of their routine, and they will think they don’t have to try as hard because it’s only their mom they are trying to please.”
The distractions at home are plentiful. At school, the family’s cats, Bopper and Copper, can’t interrupt the studying. And the kids can’t get up and ask their “teacher” if they can take a play break outside.
Despite her apprehension about the effect of a prolonged walkout on her kids, and the inconvenience of adjusting her work schedule to spend time at home with them, Pleaugh said her sympathies lie with the teachers.
“I’m not angry at the teachers,” she said. “I’m a little upset because I don’t think the school board cares about students. . . . At the school board meetings I’ve been to, they seem more concerned about renovations and air conditioners.”
Across the line
“In our school our kids are No. 1,” the bulletin board outside Neal Elementary School said.
Inside were a few dedicated pupils who were allowed to enter to pick up their books for home study.
Only a handful of teachers, most of them newcomers, and some hired just days ago, crossed the picket lines. They said they were not harassed by their colleagues as they entered the buildings.
But they said that without students, their efforts to conduct business as usual was a failed effort.
Joyce Walker, a first-year teacher, sat in her social studies classroom trying to prepare a lesson on the 1st Amendment. Richard Free, a first-year biology teacher, briefly helped a pupil with an English assignment because the teacher for that class was on strike.
They were two of three Neal teachers who refused to join colleagues outside on the picket line.
“As a non-tenured teacher, I have to look at who hired me,” Free said.