Your May 20 editorial “Avoiding school violence” misses some key points about how we have worked with schools that saw an increase in enrollment as a result of our phasing-out of a few underperforming high schools.
First of all, we pay close attention to the security needs of every single school, particularly our high schools. That scrutiny has led to a 5 percent reduction in the amount of violent incidents in our high schools this year. And in the case of Clemente and several other schools that were affected by the phase-outs, there were additional measures taken to help the schools prepare. We added security officers, upgraded technology, convened community forums and garnered additional support from other city agencies, such as the Chicago Police Department, Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy and the Chicago Transit Authority.
Clemente was well-prepared for the new students it was about to receive from the former Austin High School attendance area in the fall of 2004. And during that school year, with the new students from the Austin area, Clemente reported a 27 percent decline in violent incidents.
This school year, however, has been a rough one for Clemente. When the incidents started increasing in the fall, we responded. We paid for additional security positions at the school and sent our Security Climate Team to calm things down.
Then in February–when the school was experiencing another jump in incidents–the Clemente principal abruptly resigned. We again added more officers and worked with the Clemente community and the new leadership at the school on the security issues it still faced. And we’ve been pleased with the results. I firmly believe that Clemente is absolutely headed in the right direction.
The process of closing and phasing out high schools has been a tough one. Drastic changes such as these, which impact so many families, are always difficult. We have been and will continue to be thoughtful and careful in planning the transition to new schools for the affected families, and we have committed to limiting the number of freshmen going to any single new high school.
But we will continue to close and phase out schools that have become schools of last resort for their communities. We have an obligation to provide those families with something dramatically better, and that’s what we’re doing. We need to make every school in Chicago a school of choice.