On his first day on the job Wednesday, Englewood High School interim Principal Tommye Brown made clear his determination to turn around the academic performance of students at one of Illinois’ worst schools and to rid it of any vestige of gang control.
“When they hit the door, they should be about the business of coming to school,” Brown said of students under his administration. “They should come to school with books in their hands and prepared to study. And they should be on time.”
And, he stressed, “There won’t be any gang involvement of any means whatsoever.”
Doubters about Brown’s get-tough policy at a school where street-gang members were for a time allowed to monitor the hallways in a bizarre program to control disruptive behavior under the previous principal, can look to the stature of two administrators selected to assist him.
They are former NFL football players Gloster Richardson, a wide receiver for the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Joe Washington, a running back with the San Diego Chargers in the 1970s. Richardson is the new disciplinarian and Washington is a new assistant administrator at Englewood High.
Pat Harvey, the school system’s chief accountability officer, called Brown and his team “a breath of fresh air.”
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“He laid down the rules on the first day, and the kids sat down there with their mouths open,” Harvey said.
Brown, former principal at Yale School in the South Side Englewood neighborhood, was appointed interim principal this week after school district officials removed Warner Birts from the post, citing a poor academic showing and a lack of leadership.
Brown, 49, has been an educator for 15 years. He moved to Chicago in 1968 after graduating from Jackson State University in Mississippi and serving a short stint in the military. He also earned a degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Birts, who a school spokesman said was on vacation this week, will be assigned to an unspecified post in the system’s central office.
A 30-year veteran of the Chicago school system, Birts had served as Englewood High principal since 1989.
Birts’ tenure was marked with controversy, including the creation of what supporters called a gang deactivation program. It acknowledged gangs as a community force in a realistic sense and allowed members of rival gangs to monitor the hallways to control student behavior and maintain a gang truce during school hours.
But the program, operated for three years, came under attack when reports surfaced that some of the hallway monitors had beaten offending students. It was disbanded last year.
School officials said this week that gang problems at Englewood High are now no worse than at any other school.
In recent months, the school system has intensified security there, they said. Security personnel who performed poorly were fired, and dismissal times have been staggered to produce smaller, more manageable groups leaving at any one time.
“There has been some gang activity in the past and some gang activity remains, and we’re attempting to eradicate it with the help of the new administration as well as the community,” said George Ruckrich, the school system’s director of safety and security.
Brown called a Wednesday morning assembly to tell Englewood’s 1,300 students about his overall plans for the school.
Afterwards, Clarence Grant, an 18-year-old senior, said he liked what he heard, but that others had made similar remarks.
“He’s talking good, but in order to talk it up, you’ve got to back it up,” said Grant, an honor student planning to attend Alabama A&M University. “We need attention. If we get attention, we can do anything.”
Etta Davis, a local school council member since those panels were created in 1989, said the shakeup has created mixed emotions within the school, at 6201 S. Stewart Ave., and the surrounding community.
She said that while many community leaders liked Birts’ risk-taking leadership style, despite the controversies it sometimes provoked, many parents were happy about Brown’s appointment.
Wayne Watson, president of Kennedy King College, an institution that works very closely with Englewood neighborhood schools, called the move a positive step.
“I feel as though Tommye Brown is someone who has demonstrated that he has integrity in management and he has discipline as far as his management style and what he is willing to accept,” said Watson.
School officials said that for the next year or two, Brown will work with a remediation team sent to Englewood last year by the school system’s chief executive officer, Paul Vallas, because of the school’s persistent academic shortcomings.
A report prepared by that team led to Birts’ ouster. It cited problems such as declining Illinios Goals Assessment Program test scores, falling average ACT scores during the past two years, a student attendance rate of below 70 percent, and a 25 percent drop-out rate the past two years.
The report also said that Birts had been uncooperative and hostile to their suggestions about how to improve the school.