Chicago Schools

When Los Angeles school trustees announce this week the hiring of a new top administrator to regain control of the vast district, they will undoubtedly say the occasion represents a fresh start and a promising opportunity to make progress. No doubt, too, there will be many skeptics who will wonder whether the appointment of an interim superintendent--no matter what his qualifications--will be enough to set the troubled school system on a truer course.

If Donald, Phelicia, Terranique and the other preschool children sprawling on the floor of an aging Head Start classroom here are to have a brighter future than their parents, much depends on Jennifer Armstrong, the tall young woman holding aloft a defective jigsaw puzzle. "What's wrong with this puzzle?" she asks her charges at the Lower North Child Development Center, located in the heart of the desolate Cabrini-Green public housing projects.

Three times a day, gathering on a housing project commons where even police move with caution, men wearing orange armbands have stood their ground this week to watch out for the children. They have been there on unbearable mornings when "the hawk"--Chicago's infamous lakefront winter wind--roared past the eroding brick towers like an invisible subway. And they have returned twice each afternoon, when the cold burns off just enough for the neighborhood's gun-toting teenagers to settle old scores.

Shrieking fire alarms have interrupted classes nearly once a day this fall at King High School--signs of a long-burning blaze that will not be easily doused. The deafening horn blasts piercing the daytime silence around the South Side school are triggered neither by real flames nor an obsession with fire drills. They are false alarms, yanked over and over at fire boxes inside King's tunnel-like corridors by the students themselves. A few are pranks.

Forget about summer vacation. That's the message nearly a third of this city's elementary school population is adjusting to after being told by Chicago officials that they will have to repeat a grade unless they pass remedial summer classes. At a time when most graduating eighth-graders are looking forward to an idyllic three months before entering high school, about 7,400 Chicago students face a long summer in classrooms they thought they had seen for the last time.

"Last year there were these heavy rains, and when the sky over the ocean finally began to clear, it became filled with these clouds that looked just like Mickey Mouse ears to me," says artist Roger Brown. Thus was born the latest body of work for this artist long associated with the city of Chicago, who now spends a portion of each year in his newly built home in this little town south of Santa Barbara.

The Chicago Board of Education approved a $2.7-billion budget, officially ending a months-long financial crisis that shut down the nation's third-largest school system three times. The budget included a two-year pact with the Chicago Teachers Union and $378 million in bonds. It also allows the board to borrow $32 million in funds normally earmarked for poor students.

Gov. Jim Edgar signed a financial rescue plan for Chicago public schools late Sunday night, letting the nation's third-largest school system continue operating. The governor's signature ended almost three months of legislative wrangling over how to help the school system balance its budget. Edgar said the plan "will assure the 411,000 children are in classrooms, where they belong, without a state bailout."

Teachers and the Board of Education reached a tentative agreement here Saturday, easing threats of a shutdown in the nation's third-largest school system. Negotiators emerged from a 16-hour session before dawn to announce the breakthrough, which must be ratified by the Chicago Teachers Union and school board. "I have some good news for the city of Chicago," Mayor Richard M. Daley said. "It looks like we have a tentative agreement." No details of the proposed contract were released.