Before they crack a textbook or enter a school’s doors, most public high school students in Chicago have already taken their first test of the day.
To make it to school, students crisscross streets carved up by gangs, board buses at chaotic stops and steer clear of particularly dangerous swaths of the neighborhood. They do so with a chilling indifference. Gangs, guns, and drugs stir neighborhood violence so routine that many of the 116,000 high school students have grown numb to it.
The situation drew the nation’s attention last month when a 16-year-old Fenger High School student was beaten to death on his way to a bus stop after school, and the attack was caught on video. But every day Chicago students face perilous treks away from the lens of a camera. And every year the death toll mounts as some don’t complete the journey.
In the wake of Derrion Albert’s death, the Tribune shadowed teens from six high schools across the city, chronicling their commutes to and from school on foot, in cars and, often, on public transportation, since Chicago Public Schools typically does not bus high school students. All six said they had witnessed violence on their daily journey, and three had, themselves, been attacked or robbed while commuting.
“These are the issues they have to deal with as they go back and forth to school on a daily basis,” said Chicago Public Schools security chief Michael Shields. “These young people have been through more than we can imagine by the time they enter high school.”
Consider Percy Harris, a 17-year-old senior at Crane Tech High School on the West Side. He betrayed no fear when he described his trip to and from school.
“God’s got me,” Harris said, his voice just above a whisper. “I ain’t worried.”
Moments later, he coolly recounted the random shootings and gang-fueled fights that have erupted around him on the walk to Crane. He said that with every step he expects the unexpected — any lesser state of vigilance is a risk.
“Safe passage is one of the most pressing issues we face,” said Peggy Korellis-Byrd, principal at TEAM Englewood High School. “It seems like an impossible thing for principals to have control over. We can only go so far outside of school. It’s not like it isn’t my problem, because it is,” she said. “But it’s also a community problem.”
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Jonathan Harvey, 16, Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men and Shunetta Brown, 16, TEAM Englewood
By Kristen Mack, TRIBUNE REPORTER
On the street, he’s Jay. At Urban Prep, he’s Mr. Harvey.
Jonathan Harvey, an Englewood-area junior at Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men, navigates two worlds.
At Chicago’s only public all-boys high school he’s told he is an exceptional, strong, beautiful black man. In his neighborhood he does his best to blend in. To survive, he has to switch up his behavior.
“If I’m at school, acting the way I do in my neighborhood, that wouldn’t be acceptable,” said Harvey, 16. “If I’m in my neighborhood acting the way I do at school, I wouldn’t have any friends.”
Some of the teens from his block have classes in the same building, on 63rd Street and Stewart Avenue, but attend a different school, TEAM Englewood Community Academy. That program has a different culture and way of doing things. Some of the danger that confronts students coming or going from both schools is fueled by competition between them.
“It’s hard to share,” said Peggy Korellis-Byrd, the principal at TEAM Englewood. “We have different cultures. When you have two separate groups, there is competition.”
The tight quarters contributed to heightened tensions throughout the school year and erupted in a brawl last June. Students pulled fire alarms to empty the building for a school-on-school scuffle. No one was seriously hurt, and students at each school have a different point of view about what led to the fight.
Though they may disagree about some things, the students all have strategies to stay safe when they are on the way to or from school.
Avoid direct eye contact. Walk fast, but not too fast, you don’t want anyone to think you are scared. Keep one hand free, so you can swing back if someone hits you. Above all keep your mean mug on.
Shunetta Brown has her own methods. She leaves an hour early to avoid other students, and the problems that can come with them.
Her morning routine is choreographed down to the minute — up by 5:45 a.m., a breakfast of Sugar Smacks or Cinnamon Toast Crunch by 6:04, and out the door by 6:28 to catch her 6:37 bus.
Along her dark morning walk she passes five abandoned and boarded-up houses. Her step is swift and perfectly timed so the bus is at the stoplight when she turns the corner. During her 17 minute ride she looks out the window or talks on her cell phone to avoid engaging fellow passengers.
“It’s like, in the morning, people are so rowdy, I don’t want problems,” said Brown, 16, a sophomore at TEAM Englewood.
She said she created the custom because she was jumped last year by three girls when she was on her way home. “My guard is always up, but that day I wasn’t prepared,” she said. “That put a mind set in my head of being afraid. That damaged me a little.”
Despite Brown’s military-style precision, her mother worries.
“I don’t think she’s as cautious as I would like her to be. I know her mind is strictly on catching that bus to school,” said Catherine Griffin, 70, who has cared for Brown since she was 23 months and adopted her when she was 9.
The dangers are the same but the safety strategies slightly different for Harvey and his classmates at Urban Prep.
They shed their dress shoes, ties, white collared shirts and blazers after the last bell and put on sneakers, ball caps, oversize jackets and hoodies. They sag their pants a little lower and add an extra bounce to their gait.
“They wear their camouflage when they leave school,” said Dennis Lacewell, Urban Prep’s co-principal for academic programs, who paused at his choice of words. “Using that language makes it sound as if they are walking through a battlefield.”
This summer school administrators and community representatives met to discuss how they can keep kids safe. They instituted a parent patrol and provide security long after the school day ends. The Rev. Gerald M. Dew, whose Antioch Baptist Church is across the street from the schools, encourages his parishioners to stand on their porches and provide an extra set of eyes.
“There is power in presence,” Dew said. “No one person can man the whole area. This is everybody’s problem, and we have intersecting circles of influence. If you sweep around your front door, I sweep around mine and our neighbor sweeps around his, then eventually the block is clean.”
Still, as much as students try to stay out of harm’s way, violence finds them.
Last spring Harvey was robbed at gunpoint. His iPod and cell phone were stolen on his way to the bus stop one evening after basketball practice. Harvey blames himself for the holdup.
“I was mad at myself. That could have easily been avoided,” Harvey said. “I was lagging, I was walking slow.”
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Now he gets rides from his mother, who rearranged her work schedule because she didn’t want him to fear going to school. Although he learned to “toughen up and watch my surroundings,” on the days he has to ride the bus, he said “violence is nothing a teenager should ever get used to.”
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Crystal Magana, 14, Little Village Lawndale High
By Oscar Avila, Tribune reporter
Crystal Magana said she was a third-grader when she learned which gangs operate where in Little Village.
Those lessons serve her well as the freshman makes the mile-long walk back home from Little Village Lawndale High School. On the way, she’ll often stop to talk to young men she knows to be in gangs.
“I’m not going to lie. Just about everyone I know is in a gang,” she said. “If I didn’t talk to gangbangers, I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to.”
Her father, Jose, listened to his daughter say she’d never join a gang and shook his head.
“You don’t understand. Please, Pa,” said Crystal. “Girls can be with gangs and throw signs but they’re not in gangs. It’s nothing.”
“It’s the same thing, mija,” Jose responded.
Father and daughter agree that the high school itself is relatively safe, despite occasional gang scuffles and racial flare-ups between the Mexican-American majority and African-American students who come south from North Lawndale.
It’s the 30-minute trip to and from the school on South Kostner Avenue that keeps Jose Magana worrying about his oldest child.
Magana would like to drive her to school, but he goes to work at 7 a.m., two hours before Crystal needs to be at school.
So Crystal walks, usually with a girlfriend. Crystal often avoids her friend’s block because guys she knew were fatally shot there.
“I know what I’m doing,” Crystal, 14, insisted. “They’re not going to shoot girls. Now that would be really messed up.”
The trickiest stretch is around Piotrowski Park, where a recent afternoon found small clusters of young men laughing even as their eyes followed the cars that passed along West 31st Street. Crystal has seen those men — some of them friends — throw bricks at rival gangs.
Fortunately, Crystal doesn’t have to cross boundaries that divide the Latin Kings and Two Six gangs that control the neighborhood. Still, “walking to and from that school is like walking through a minefield,” said Michael Rodriguez, violence prevention director at Enlace Chicago, a neighborhood group.
Magana has offered to pick up Crystal when she leaves school around 4 p.m. “I’m like ‘No way.’ I’m not 10 years old,” she complained.
Her father knows that all too well.
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Erica Bajo, 18, Steinmetz Academic Centre
By Antonio Olivo, Tribune reporter
With less than a year left at Steinmetz Academic Centre high school in Belmont-Craigin, Erica Bajo has learned a few survival strategies.
If you’re crazy enough to wear a hooded sweat shirt to school, never make it black-and-pink, black-and-gold, or blue-and-white — unless you’re in a gang and angling for trouble.
If you see a boy at the bus stop in the Northwest Side neighborhood getting beaten by four other students, it’s best to look away.The same rule applies when a girl arrives in the counselor’s office and interrupts your efforts to get out of a hard math class by bleeding profusely after a fight on the sprawling campus.
“She just walked in like it was nothing,” marveled Bajo, 18, about that last incident. “She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t (mad). She was like: `Here I am.'”
Tucked among tidy bungalows in a blue-collar section of the neighborhood known as “The Brickyard,” Steinmetz is far from Chicago’s most troubled school. Its rigorous college-prep program earned the school a spot on Newsweek magazine’s 2009 list of 1,500 top high schools in the country.
Even so, fights are routine, especially after school when teens from rival gangs linger outside, parents and students said.
After neighbors complained about the violence in 2007, Chicago police installed a surveillance camera on one end of campus, but residents said it hasn’t curtailed the fighting much.
Bajo, a shy but friendly member of the poetry club, writes her observations in a psychedelic-designed notebook.
“From food fights to getting jumped, one wrong word is all it takes to get a bullet in the head,” one poem reads.
After another girl last year sought to start a fight during lunch by bumping her repeatedly, Bajo has avoided conflict by getting to school early, avoiding the cafeteria and leaving before most students. Lunch consists of quick snacks between classes.
“The less time there, the better,” she said.
She leaves her Dunning home at 6:15 a.m. for an hourlong, two-bus trip to school.
Another poem captures her state most mornings:
“I’m exhausted already and it’s only 7 a.m.”
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Bruce McFall, 17, Corliss High School
By Azam Ahmed, Tribune reporter
Bruce McFall descended the stairs of his South Pullman home just before sunrise. He stepped out into a slight drizzle and walked down his quiet block to 123rd Street, then east to Halsted Street to catch the first of two buses that would carry him to school.
The 17-year-old passes drug houses, vacant lots and abandoned homes where rotted plywood covers windows and doors. One street, 123rd, is the dividing line between two gangs. The risks barely register.
“I don’t think too much about it,” said McFall, a Corliss High School junior who stands about 6 feet 2 inches tall. “Because who’s gonna change it?”
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McFall tries to avoid trouble by following a simple maxim: Keep it moving. That’s what he does when he sees trouble brewing after school, when a bus stop is too crowded, when teens congregate in front of the McDonald’s where he works.
He was robbed by three men less than a month ago on his way home from band practice. He has since switched bus routes on the way to school, and his mother, Angela Caldwell, a local school council member at Corliss, picks him up nearly every day after school.
As he walked on a recent morning, he paid more attention at Halsted. The addicts congregate at the corner gas station, he said, and people get jumped all the time. He hides his school ID to avoid fights with kids from nearby high schools.
“Anything can happen here,” he said.
Keep it moving.
On 115th Street, he waited 20 minutes in a steady rain for a bus as the sun slowly started to light up the street. On the bus, the crowd swelled. Soon the driver was idling, waiting until the passengers moved to the back to let more people on. A woman screamed expletives at the kids.
The mother of one student warned the woman not to yell. A shouting match between the two grown-ups escalated as each made violent threats. For a moment, McFall’s face registered concern. Then, as others laughed, so did he.
A minute later at 103rd Street, the students unloaded. They laughed harder now, perhaps in relief.
“It’s wrong to laugh,” McFall said as he walked. “But that’s what it’s like.”
Students filed past a Citgo station, where crowds gather before school. The smell of marijuana filled the air.
Keep it moving.
At the school’s entrance, students sent their bags and other items through a metal detector. McFall disappeared among the throng of students collecting their things on the other end.
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