Attending school in Elgin School District U46 involves a lot more than sitting through a lecture about quadratic equations (though it does involve that, too), 75 community leaders and business people learned Friday as they went into U46 schools as “principals for a day” to see how the schools function. The two who toured Larkin High School discovered how teenagers there can perform in musical plays, write poetry, carve sculptures, read to 4-year-olds, cook a meal, fix cars, lathe metal parts, and even create a crude but workable prosthetic hand on a “3-D printing” machine.
They also got the chance to join one class at this school as a guest speaker told how he lifted himself out of drug addiction and crime.
By the end of their five-hour tour, Principal for a Day Jennifer Alberts said she was left thinking, “I wish we would talk more about how awesome our schools are in Elgin instead of being so negative.” If more people could see what she had seen that day, she said, School District U46 would have a much better image.
U46’s 57 classroom buildings each got at least one principal-for-a-day. The ones assigned to Larkin were Alberts, who is the community outreach exec at the Taylor Family YMCA , and William Wright, who’s director of a company that recruits business executives. Alberts said she picked Larkin because the YMCA often recruits its students to work at the nearby YMCA. Wright said he asked for Larkin because his son Will attends the District U46 Visual and Performing Arts Academy that is housed at Larkin.
That family relationship gave Wright a chance to embarrass his son as real Principal Jon Tuin took the visitors into young Wright’s English class just as members were discussing why romance is such a common theme in Shakespeare’s work.
Tuin showed the proliferation of posters advertising the upcoming musical “Once Upon A Mattress.” He said that “if a kid gets to do one thing they love every day, they know they can get through the other classes,” whether that first love is fixing a car engine or playing the cello or competing in a varsity sport.
As they visited a computer lab, they found senior Ariel Hildenbrand doing what she most loves — drawing animated cartoons on a computer. She stopped to show the visitors a stop-action featurette she had already finished. “I drew 10 bodies, 100 heads and shot about 1,000 frames to make this,” she explained. She talked about her hopes of making a career at some place like Disney.
Tuin seemed almost to know every student by name, greeting many they passed in the hall and telling the visitors how “so and so didn’t speak English when he arrived here four years ago and he got a 29 on his ACT test” or “so and so finished third in the state in the last speech tournament” or “so and so is on such and such a team that finished second in the conference this year.”
In a lab used by the Project Lead the Way pre-engineering students, teachers Diane Kriescher and David Serewicz showed how students are designing a workable prosthetic hand that can be made on site with a 3-D printer. Over in a true AVID class — a class meant to prepare low-income students for college — teacher Dragan Teonic talked about how his students should use “who, what, where, when, how and why” as they write up a paper in college-style format. Then Teonic introduced a guest speaker for the day, a Larkin High computer technician named Naul Conejo.
As the visitors sat with the students, Conejo alternated between comedy and passion as he described how he had become a teenage drug addict but had turned his life around after his mother said she wished he were dead. He then joined the Army, was wounded several times in combat and is now completing a college degree.
Tuin explained the school’s “Royal POWER” theme, the only thing that appears on even more wall posters at Larkin than “Once Upon A Mattress.” The program exhorts students to “be involved, be engaged, be prepared, but above all be respectful and be safe.” The program even offers students rewards — “ROYAL-ties” — for that.
Tuin led Wright and Alberts into the room where the week’s “Cookiegrams” were being prepared. Usually, he said, teachers nominate students to receive Cookiegrams — a cookie plus a congratulatory greeting card — because the student did some particularly worthy deed. But on this Friday, the tables had been turned, and students had nominated teachers to get Cookiegrams because of how they had been using the principles of AVID training in their classes, even if they weren’t teaching AVID classes. The first recipient was Akta Desai, whom they caught teaching an advanced math class (in English) to English Language Learners.
Passing by the central courtyard, Tuin explained plans to turn that into an agroponic pond for use by Advanced Placement environmental science classes. “All the other U46 high schools have access to natural areas around their buildings, but we don’t here,” he explained. So Larkin will create its own.
After delivering a Cookiegram to macroeconomics teacher Deryn Carter, in the hall they ran into history teacher Doug Ellett. Ellett said he has been teaching at Larkin so long, Carter used to be one of his students.
“The perception and the reality of this school are totally different,” Ellett told the visitors. “Go out and blow your horn and let people know that.”
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