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School Reform Leaves Clemente Simmering: Austin Students Added, Creating a Volatile Mix

Posted on: Monday, 8 May 2006, 09:10 CDT

By Stephanie Banchero, Chicago Tribune

May 8--Stephen Flagg boards the No. 70 bus near his Austin home early one morning with classmates and travels east along Division Street through his African-American community.

The bus cruises into the heavily Latino neighborhoods of Humboldt Park and West Town, passing under the massive metal Puerto Rican flags that arch Division, and drops the teenagers at Clemente High School.

Though it is eight months into the school year, Flagg, 16, who attends Clemente because his neighborhood school was closed for poor performance, says he still does not feel comfortable at his new, mainly Latino school.

"They don't want us here. We don't want to be here," he said. "Everybody is different, and that's why everybody is fighting."

Since Chicago school officials began phasing out Austin High School two years ago and dispersing hundreds of teenagers to crosstown Clemente, violence has invaded the hallways and spilled across campus. Student morale has plummeted. And racial tensions--already simmering under the surface--have bubbled over.

This year, nine teachers, an assistant principal and two deans were threatened or hit. Students were stabbed, choked and robbed, school reports show. A schoolyard brawl sucked in 40 students.

Amid all this, the principal of 10 years abruptly quit in March without a specific reason.

Two years after Chicago officials began shutting low-performing high schools and moving students to nearby campuses as part of Renaissance 2010 reforms, the crime rate at five of the nine schools that received the bulk of students has shot up. The migration of teenagers across racially isolated neighborhoods, through gang boundaries and into schools where they often are culturally or racially different from classmates, has burdened a high school system already struggling to educate students.

The turbulence underscores the difficulty in reforming high schools, a task that has become a national obsession.

Chicago has shut nine elementary schools in five years, shifting thousands of pupils into new schools in new neighborhoods. Few problems surfaced.

But high schools are far more complicated.

They are filled with adolescents negotiating a painful path between independence and reliance on adults. Peer influences are strong, and navigating a school culture and its cliques can be tough for teens. Shifting in new kids from a different neighborhood--not to mention a different race--can upset that equilibrium.

"Given all that teenagers already are dealing with, asking them to navigate a whole new social structure is going to stress them out," said Leslie Santee Siskin, a New York University professor who has spent 15 years researching high schools and high school reform.

David Pickens, who oversees school closings for the Chicago Public Schools, acknowledges that the district could have done a better job helping high schools with the transitions, but said they are more prepared for next year. The district has set aside $1 million to assist schools absorbing new students and will cap the number of transfers.

"We've learned a lot from what has happened this year," Pickens said.

Even before the Austin students arrived, Clemente was simmering.

The school, an eight-story glass and brick building at Division and Western Avenue, has long been an extension of the community. Named after Puerto Rican baseball hero Roberto Clemente, the campus anchors the Fiesta Boricua, a Puerto Rican heritage festival that stretches down Division. In 1990 nearly 60 percent of the student body was Puerto Rican.

But in the 1990s, Mexicans flooded into Humboldt Park, West Town and Logan Square. Last year, Puerto Ricans made up only 36 percent of Clemente's enrollment. Mexicans constituted 31 percent.

Many Mexican students say they are looked down on and treated differently from their Puerto Rican classmates.

A few years ago, the school's Mexican club organized its own prom, after some Mexican students complained that the disc jockeys played hip-hop and rap preferred by Puerto Ricans, while they prefer Duranguense music. Some complain that the school offers more support to the baseball team, composed mainly of Puerto Ricans, than it does to the soccer team, made up mainly of Mexicans.

"This is our school too, but we feel like we are not welcome," said Leonardo Delvalle, a Guatemalan senior soccer player.

On top of this stew of racial and cultural division, the school system instituted Renaissance 2010.

Though Austin students began transferring two years ago, problems did not surface until this year, when their enrollment hit 250, school officials said.

By early October, gang warfare erupted. School officials, security guards and students say the Gangster Disciples from Austin warred with the Latino Vice Lords and Lovers for control of the school. Students were jumped outside the school as they exited for fire drills. Fistfights broke out in the hallways.

Only a small portion of the school's 2,400 students were involved in the violence, but it put a dark cloud over the school.

"Girls were fighting over guys, guys were fighting over gangs, guys were fighting for respect, girls and guys were fighting for territory," said Michael Rivera, a junior on the baseball team. "At first it was just the gangs, but then it went from gangs to different cultures, from gangs to race. People were fighting just because they were different."

One need only look inside the Clemente cafeterias, talk to students or read the student newspaper to see the divide.

On a recent afternoon a group of African-American girls sat at a lunch table munching pizza and discussing eyebrow plucking. At the end of the table, five Puerto Rican boys debated the talent of the school's baseball team. Nearby, a dozen boys, most of them of Mexican descent, huddled together talking in Spanish about a friend who was pushed in the hallway.

Virtually every issue of the monthly Clemente Voice, the school's year-old newspaper, contains at least one article or editorial highlighting the violence or racial strife.

"It's depressing and disappointing to see minorities fighting minorities when they should come together to be one," Damaris Ortiz wrote. "We have people judging each other because of the color of our skin."

The cultural conflicts at Clemente reveal the troubling realities of the city's public school system.

More than 85 percent of the system's black students attend schools that are overwhelmingly black; about 80 percent of Latino students go to schools that are mainly Latino. The segregation means students have little exposure to cultures different from their own.

"When you go to somewhere new, like to a party, the hostess should make you feel comfortable and welcome," said Camille Villegas, a junior of Puerto Rican and African-American descent. "But the Austin kids just came here and the administration didn't tell us they were coming, and nobody made them feel welcome. Everybody just left it up to us to figure out how to get along. Maybe that was the mistake."

sbanchero@tribune.com

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Source: Chicago Tribune

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