When KIPP charter school was given space inside Penn elementary in North Lawndale nearly four years ago, charter students were bused from all over the West Side to a school in the heart of the “Holy City,” home turf of the Vice Lords street gang.
Penn, where classrooms were still equipped with blackboards and where less than half of the students met state standards, had to share its building with a national charter network that furnished its classrooms with state-of-the-art projectors, enforced a strict discipline code and emphasized a path to college.
The cultural schism that developed inside the halls of the building at 1616 S. Avers Ave. led to conflicts between students and even teachers. A mediator had to be called in to settle bickering between the two schools over space.
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The neighborhood also resented the outsiders from KIPP using their school. Violence has been a constant threat.
As Chicago Public Schools gets ready to close an unknown number of schools across the city this year, officials acknowledge it’s possible that more neighborhood schools could wind up sharing space with privately run charters, which in most cases have greater resources. What happened at Penn and KIPP is a lesson in the trouble that can result from closing schools and shifting students around the city. It also illustrates the stark inequalities that exist throughout the system.
Leaders of Ceasefire say they have helped defuse potential clashes outside the school. The anti-violence group moved its North Lawndale operation into the building this school year.
“The kids themselves, they feel different,” said Corin Federick, whose son is an eighth-grader at Penn. “They feel the KIPP kids think they’re better than them. It teaches separatism, and that’s not OK.”
In a neighborhood where gang violence is an everyday occurrence, conflicts over control of a school is a serious concern. The 2009 videotaped beating death of Derrion Albert was the result of a brawl between Fenger High School students from different neighborhoods. Gang alliances and a culture of turf control create daily risks for schoolkids in Chicago.
District officials say security is a primary concern as they decide which buildings to close and which school communities to combine. “CPS knows the importance of reviewing the dynamics involved with merging school communities in planning for a safe environment,” Jadine Chou, the district’s safety and security chief, said in an email.
But those who’ve witnessed the tensions brought on by putting Penn and KIPP together say CPS failed to understand the dynamics of the neighborhood.
“When the KIPP kids came, we were like, ‘These people don’t know where they’re at,'”said the Rev. Robin Hood, Ceasefire’s administrator for North Lawndale.
Although the group began operating full time at Penn just last fall, Hood has made the school a focus since 2009 because Penn is in the heart of a neighborhood rife with violence.
One of North Lawndale’s most notorious murders was the 2000 slaying of Conservative Vice Lords kingpin Elbert “Pierre” Mahone, who was kidnapped just a block from Penn before being fatally shot. In November, a fight between Penn boys over a stolen pair of boots escalated into a relative of one of the kids showing up in an alley near the school with a gun.
Derek Brown, a Ceasefire coordinator in the neighborhood who once ran drug-dealing operations for Mahone, put it this way: “Penn school was always the ruler of the neighborhood. This is where the (Vice Lords) leaders came from.”
So when new kids began coming in from outside North Lawndale, students and parents from the community began warning Penn Principal Sherryl Moore-Ollie that the school was being taken over. It didn’t help that in the first years of the arrangement, KIPP added grades and wanted more space from Penn.
“(KIPP) believed this would be their building,” Moore-Ollie said. “One of their administrators told me that. They didn’t think we’d still be here. But in my mind, they weren’t going to take over our building, not as long as my kids were here.”
KIPP officials acknowledge that the relationship between the two schools has been rocky, but they say things are getting better. In the last year, the charter has shared some professional development programming with Penn, and it is putting together a document on how charters can share resources, such as grant-writing techniques, with neighborhood schools.
“It would’ve been great to do it a couple of years ago, but we were in a different place than we are right now,” says April Goble, executive director of KIPP Chicago.
For school districts, the arrangements known as co-shares help solve underenrollment problems, reduce overhead costs and may drive improved performance through competition.
But often the more prominent result is tension and fear for the publicly run school, said Christopher Lubienski, associate professor of education policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“Reformers see it as a major incentive to do better, but staff at the neighborhood school don’t see it as a level playing field,” Lubienski said. “They think they’re being given the short end of a stick and they’re being forced to compete with a group that has been given favorable considerations.”
A final list of schools being closed this year, which could lead to decisions regarding co-shares, isn’t due until the end of March. Penn is one of at least four district-run schools on the preliminary list of 129 schools that could be closed that share their building with a privately run school.
In 2011, the tug of war over space at Penn landed before a mediator. Parents and teachers from Penn attended board meetings and accused the charter of inflating its enrollment numbers. KIPP denied that charge and, in the end, the charter got more space.
Goble denies there were ever serious safety problems at the school, or that gang influence is a major problem at KIPP.
“There wasn’t a problem,” Goble said. “Of course, we were identifying space and we worked through that. To attribute this to gang violence is a huge exaggeration of the situation.”
Yet in a letter written this school year to Ceasefire, KIPP Principal Lauren Henley thanked the group for help in dealing with two students who were “beginning to be involved in gang activity.”
Whether or not kids are involved in gangs, conflicts in neighborhoods with high violent crime rates are inevitably influenced by the rules of the street. The grandmother of one KIPP student credits the charter with directly addressing her grandson’s gang issues.
Linda Baity’s grandson started to get involved with gangs in their Austin neighborhood last summer, she said, and “he thought being suspended was cool.”
She said school staff and Ceasefire workers have made efforts to put him back on track, as well as dealing with the dangers of the boy busing into North Lawndale from Austin.
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“When the kids get out of school, KIPP teachers are out there. They make sure they protect them,” Baity said. “I rate them real high.”
For the past four months, Ceasefire has been holding an after-school boxing program for children of both Penn and KIPP, and Hood says that has helped dampen the tension. So has the fact that this year, KIPP moved kindergarten through fourth grade to a nearby school that was closed last year, Lathrop Elementary.
While the situation inside the building may be calmer, Penn’s future remains shaky. The district says 65 percent of the building is being used. However, some of the underused rooms are occupied by 140 special-education students, which could be a factor in Penn’s favor as CPS makes its final decisions.
Officials say the district is working with Chicago police and their own data to determine which schools should stay open for security reasons. Closing high schools has been taken out of consideration because of safety risks.
Despite the tensions since putting Penn and KIPP together four years ago, Moore-Ollie said she fears for her students if they have to transfer to another school in the area. She said a new mix of students at schools in many high-crime neighborhoods will require the buildings to have “24-hour police protection.”
“I can’t even imagine it happening,” she said.