Mar 12 2009
“It was like a scene out of the Breakfast Club”
That’s how I recalled standing in for an in-school suspension room when I substitute taught at a school on the North Side of Chicago. A school not far from where my wife lived for a few years before she left the country. A school near where a teenager was fatally shot the other day - the 26th Chicago Public School student shot in this school year.
That’s as many students as were shot all of last school year, when citywide violence against young people was all the newspapers could talk about. The Chicago Sun-Times reports, “At this time in 2008, 19 students had been killed. In 2007, 18 were dead by March 11… The Sun-Times reported this week that 508 students had been shot from Sept. 2007 through Dec. 2008.”
This right after a student in a West Side school stabs his bully with a pair of scissors during a conflict resolution meeting.
I must admit I was wrong. The school didn’t measure up to what I’d seen as being a “bad” school. The neighborhood, compared to Humboldt Park or much of Logan Square, didn’t seem to be in dire need of a social overhaul or a bunch of Hugs for Troubled Thugs-type programs. But everybody hurts, and violence can happen anywhere: small towns in Alabama or a high school in Germany.
This is a systemic problem. It needs systemic solutions. Not just a hero, tons of them. Neighborhoods full of fathers and mothers and churches and mosques and synagogues and non-profits and teachers and administrators and counselors and cafeteria workers and accountants and line cooks and law clerks and construction workers and carpenters and butchers and candlestick makers and community activists and police all joining up to be good neighbors. We all need to be heroes. We owe it to this next generation to not abandon them in their hour of need.
