An unforunate outcome but a potential idea...

On April 13th, I went to a Local School Council meeting for my old high school (GO HARLAN FALCONS!!!!). Just before the meeting two of the council members had a talk about a student. One of them was a parent of the student and the other I believe was a counselor. This counselor had approached me about participating in a career day but currently I still have no "Morehouse man job".

The gist of the convo is that the young lady wanted to go to Spelman College. It seems as if her heart was set for Spelman but then came the financial aid award from them. And then disappointment set in!

The award from what I got from the convo was heavy on loans and unless I'm mistaken I heard nothing about grants. Even with that in mind they still had to come up with some cash to finish off the balance. It's safe to say momma wasn't going for Spelman College this trip and she referred to this award as a "racket".

The young girl was upset but after some reflection decided to focus her energies onto Howard University. Apparently Howard had offered her a better deal with a scholarship and let me not be dismissive of Howard it's still a great school. But this story made me wish that well I had some contacts at Spelman to help this young lady out a bit.

Also this leads to other questions. I would like to be this bold but without getting into anyone's business although I already did that by tuning into the conversation.

The counselor seems to have predicted that Spelman wasn't going to give this young lady any money. It makes me wonder how she decided that. The mother noted that the counselor was beaming when she heard the young lady was considering Howard University. Though perhaps beaming as if she knew that this was going to happen.

During my time at Morehouse College I had to learn the financial aid game. I never turned in applications on time but I knew the "high-touch" paying a visit to financial aid advisers could make a different. Well at least in the time before my return to Morehouse after one disastrous semester.

It's understandable that momma may not have wanted to go for it looking at the award. Of course if one was determined to go to the school of their choice there is a way. Of course, that might mean trying to eke out more money so that they can go to school figuring out how to pay for it after a year is entirely another. Then again I wasn't a senior in high school like this young lady is currently trying to figure this out. Though it does make me wonder what is the difference between Spelman College and Howard University. In fact this gives me an interesting idea.

It does give me one idea that's been in my head for quite a while. If there was one thing I do wish I could do for students at Harlan High School it would be to help provide scholarships so that they can attend the university of their choice. Although if I could my goal would be to start small and hopefully help some young Harlanite who wanted to go to Morehouse get a decent scholarship to be able to attend that prestigious Atlanta, Georgia institution. That may also mean that Morehouse needs to add one more place to recruit!

From excellence to exodus, Harlan strives for rebirth Part 2

I promised in last Sunday's post a part 2 the next day, well there were other things of interest going on. Indeed I haven't posted the last two days so it should have been either Thursday or Friday, but I didn't commit. Today I commit.

So Part 2 is supposed to be about leadership. I mentioned that one of my classmates had his two cents about our principal during our time there. Of course let me preferace that by saying he doesn't blame her for everything and nor would I for that matter. Although in that position well the turnaround either didn't take or she was in over her head.

So we take you back to December 2001 when that Catalyst article was written and the excerpts will focus on the school's leadership:

Achievement continued to decline, the building to decay. Harlan’s principals may have felt too overwhelmed to fight for the school or were simply resigned to their circumstances, Foster speculates. “Somebody should have been over at the board beating on the table, ‘We’re dying out here.’”

By the mid-‘90s, only 7 percent of Harlan students scored at grade level in reading on the Tests of Achievement and Proficiency. Oehmen recalls that era as a low point for student morale. “Most had been sent here and didn’t want to be here. Somehow, Harlan had become the school of last resort.”

In September 1996, the mayor’s new school team placed low-scoring schools like Harlan on academic probation. Schools were to select a university or non-profit organization from an approved list to help them improve instruction and school management.

My algebra teacher went off on us one day. He was temperamental guy, but he wasn't always. I think he may have brought it up. The school being on probation was likely the first time I have ever heard that. I don't know if we were supposed to know about that. If we were then just as easily the parents should have known about this. I would imagine that many would have shrugged it off, parents or students wouldn't have had any interest in either transferring or turning that school around or whatever.

To the first paragraph of the excerpt, I wonder how overwhelming was the problem. Prior to the takeover of the schools by the City of Chicago, I remember there was always talk of budget deficits, something amazingly enough we still don't hear much about. Even though before former CPS CEO Arne Duncan became the Secretary of Education he was talking about more money for schools.

I remember this concept suffered a quiet death. We had small schools then the next year there were no more small schools...

Harlan went through a revolving door of external partners. The school dropped the University of Illinois’ Small Schools Workshop, reasoning that dividing staff into smaller “schools-within-schools” was impractical given the small student body, an administrator recalls.

There were other partners, but for some reason these partners didn't fit very well with the school. The article doesn't explain but all this switching was taking its toll on the school's faculty:

“Each time, it’s all new paperwork, all new routines,” one veteran teacher says of the constant switching. “You learn to use new materials and next year, start all over again.”

Teachers say they were inundated with paperwork. Under probation, staff are required to document their efforts to improve achievement, such as contacting parents and planning curriculum.

“Each year it became more and more insane,” one teacher recalls. “There were 1,000 things to do.” Between the spring of 1997 and the spring of 1999, Harlan had the fourth highest teacher-turnover rate of any high school in the district, according to data provided by the Consortium on Chicago School Research. Over 20 teachers left.

“It got to the point of ‘Why are we doing this?’” another teacher explains. “We get paid the same as people who don’t have to put up with this.”

This is when I found out that my classmate was telling the truth about our former principal. Not that I didn't believe him but this next excerpt brought what he said home:

Some describe their principal at the time, Barbara Edwards, as likable but ineffective. She failed to clamp down on teachers who were repeatedly late to work or neglected paperwork, one veteran recalls.

The school’s test scores remained stagnant. In the spring of 2000, the board ousted Edwards, and scrambled to find Harlan a new leader.

Then it came time to find a new Principal for Harlan, the one selected used to be a principal at a  grammar school. The students weren't very happy:

Students were less receptive. Grissett introduced herself at an assembly and laid down some new rules. “Everyone booed,” recalls Anthony Ellis, a junior. “We liked our old principal—she let us do whatever we wanted.”

Several honors students say they viewed arriving at class on time as optional and, the day before vacations, routinely cut out after 3rd period— right in front of the security guards. “National ditch day,” they called it.

You know, it wasn't until senior year when I started cutting. Of course it was only on days before vacations or when I knew there was no class. Perhaps there was no excuse for doing it, but then there was a reason why students ditched. Perhaps student morale was low as well as the staff no one wanted to do anything.

But with a new regime things have changed, it's a wonder what leadership would do!

Now, with consequences like Saturday detention, tardies are down 50 percent, one girl estimates. The same security guards are more alert, too, the kids say. “They’re going to chase you,” another girl reports.
...
Since 1996, the School Board has sunk billions into school renovation and construction, and Grissett got Harlan its share.

“She wrote letters, she called people. ‘How can we not have basic things?’ She just stayed on top of it,” says Associate Principal Gertrude Hill, who is Grissett’s second-in-command.

Foster observes that in this system, principals must squeak to get grease. “She squeaked loud and hard down at central office about her needs.”
...
Joyce Woldemariam, who has a master’s degree in mathematics, decided to switch schools this year. She says she chose Harlan for its small size and because it was her first interview. She reports she has a cabinet full of supplies and easy access to administrators. “They tend to ask a lot—what do you need? And I like that.”

You may want to know where's Harlan today. Well they have a new principal and are poised for new success in the future. They have an academic center (AC), if I recall before I went to school at Harlan I had this 8th teacher who claimed that he opposed sending 7th & 8th graders to Harlan. Although since ACs are touted at advanced for 7th & 8th graders it might be one way of changing the student culture of a school. I think my former 8th Grade teacher lost that battle. I can't tell you how he viewed this development.

This fall a magnet program in engineering is starting up there. If only there was ROTC when I was there, because I would have been involved, I was already interesting at that time in the military. It's possible that there was a lot Harlan missed out on back then that now today's students will take advantage of.

You know if Harlan's reputation was for violence or lack of academic rigor, it takes time to change that rep. I hope that Harlan can become as well know for it's reputation as a school that can send students to the top schools in the nation. I want to see that happen. It doesn't have to be Whitney Young or any other selective enrollment or magnet high schools.

From excellence to exodus, Harlan strives for rebirth Part 1

Yesterday, I decided to peruse the home page of my high school alma mater, Harlan Community Academy. For the most part I keep it vague about where I went to school perhaps save for one time. I blogged a story in year one about a shooting that took place within the school. It caused me to post a couple of blogs at The Sixth Ward about Harlan as they have a NING group, a blog, and even a Twitter account.

Awesome news I though as I found those thru their compilation of links, more specifically their "in the news" links, an article from the Dec. 2001 issue of Catalyst Chicago. This website's beat is Chicago's public schools.

Anyway this article, gives a good time line of events which brings you to roughly the time I started to attend the school. First in excerpting this article let's look at some background these numbers are from 2001:

Harlan High School stands on a tree-lined street across from a row of tidy bungalows in Roseland. With its clean brick walls and park-side location, it hardly fits the image of an urban school of last resort.

Yet that’s what it has become. Last year, Harlan lost 77 percent of Chicago public high school students in its attendance area—a total of 1,529—to other Chicago public high schools. That’s the highest “defection rate” in the city.

An 8th-grader at a nearby elementary school puts it bluntly: “Most people who come out of here, if they don’t make the score, they go to Harlan,” she says, meaning grade-level scores on standardized tests. “If they made the score, they go to CVS or Simeon or Hyde Park—any other high school.”

Then what happened to make Harlan from a premier school with an incredible faculty to one which may be considered a school of last resort?

Harlan’s decline was gradual and, by most accounts, began in the mid-1970s. Middle-class Roseland was growing poorer, and the once integrated neighborhood was rapidly losing white residents. Still, the school attracted its share of good students, veteran teachers recall.

At the time, the alternatives were several vocational schools and two elite technical schools. “Permissive transfers” also allowed students to attend schools where they would improve racial balance. For the most part, though, Chicago public high school students of the ‘70s stayed in their own neighborhoods.

Like many South Side high schools, Harlan was desperately overcrowded. The building was designed to house about 1,300 but enrolled some 3,500 students. Twenty-six mobile units stood out back, teachers recall.

The first blow to Harlan’s reputation came disguised as a blessing. To relieve overcrowding, the district opened two new high schools on the Far South Side, Corliss in 1974 and Julian in 1975. Harlan students were given the option of attending either. They left in droves.

Now we go back to perhaps how Harlan became the school to go to in the first place and then when Corliss and Julian opened, they were new and people wanted to be a part of those schools. Although these days Corliss or even Julian probably aren't considered premier schools themselves. Then again this might have something to do with the sudden exodus of bright students from Harlan in the mid 1970s:

Albert Foster, the district’s recently retired director of school intervention, attended Harlan in its glory days (Class of 1962). A March 1999 visit to the school left him deeply discouraged. For one, the building was in terrible disrepair: missing hall tiles, beat-up desks, plexiglass windows that had grown opaque, broken heating ducts that left classrooms cold.
...
Former Harlan teacher and school alum Janice Ollarvia, now principal of Fenger High School, thinks students were attracted by superior facilities at the new schools. “Harlan was built when they were tossing schools up, and the quality of the construction wasn’t that good,” she explains. “It soon started to show.”

If you thought "community academy" would you think private school? In fact when I talk about where I went to school that's exactly the response I get, but the reality is:

Magnet schools came next. Whitney Young opened in 1975, became a selective magnet school in 1980 and drew top students from across the city. Then in the early 1980s, the district launched magnet programs to attract students of different races to segregated high schools. Harlan’s neighboring high schools got programs in computer science or communications or literature and history, but Harlan was designated a “community academy” that would stress basic skills.

As fewer top students opted for Harlan during the ‘80s, the school’s Advanced Placement offerings in English, math, history, biology and chemistry dwindled to none, [computer teacher Jack] Oehmen recalls.

Would low-achievers make for students who might do sports teams?

Sports teams suffered, too. “You might think: Give me a school of low-achievers, and I’ll have a heck of a sports team,” Foster remarks. “No you won’t. Those kids don’t go out for sports … don’t go out for clubs. Then your school doesn’t have much in offerings.”

Oops!

You know I wrote about a classmate's comments on our former principal. The article touched upon this in fact an update on the fate of our former principal, but this article is starting to get long winded so therefore I shall continue this. Don't let me forget now!

We might look at more on the leadership at the school because perhaps in our day it sure needed it. The next question is what's happening at the school now. I explore that more tomorrow!

BTW, the pic of Harlan at night is mine and it's an old pic taken about three or so years ago. The Harlan logo is lifted directly from the Harlan website.