Lucky Number 13 Cultivating community relationships proves to be the good luck charm for Chicago International’s 13th campus by Carol Gifford | photos by Joshua Dunn
On the far south side of Chicago stands a sprawling, 157-acre public housing project called Altgeld Gardens. Built in 1945 to address the housing needs of African-Americans returning from World War II, the neighborhood is one of the city’s poorest communities—90 percent of the neighborhood students qualify for free/ reduced lunch—in one of the city’s most secluded areas. But on August 17, the residents saw a hopeful event in their neighborhood: the opening of CICS Lloyd Bond, the 13th campus of Chicago International. Approximately 300 students, grades K–8, poured through the school’s doors; classrooms and corridors were filled with students and parents buzzing with excitement.
“This is exactly the type of neighborhood where we like to provide families with more school options,” says Beth Purvis, executive director of Chicago International. “It has high poverty and unemployment rates with a mixed record of performance at area schools. And yet it does have a great community with really involved parents who want the best education possible for their children.”
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Chicago International had never opened a school in a housing project before, and this neighborhood is not only isolated from the city, but it has also been in transition for the past several years as the city conducts community-wide renovations with nearly 2,000 family housing units scheduled for rehabilitation. Together with its partner, Education Management Organization Edison Learning, Chicago International worked hard in the months leading up to the school’s opening to engage the community and work with Altgeld Gardens’ key stakeholders— all in an effort to start the school year off right and prepare for the school’s longterm success. Long before CICS Lloyd Bond opened, Chicago International took key steps to get to know the community and to help the community learn about the charter school. School leaders came prepared, after learning a tremendous amount from the opening of the CICS Ralph Ellison campus in the Austin-Gresham neighborhood only one year earlier. That experience clearly demonstrated the importance of developing a mutually respectful and beneficial partnership with local leaders as well as working alongside the community. To prepare for the school opening, school staff began cultivating strong partnerships with the Chicago Housing
Authority, the Local Advisory Council (resident leaders of the Altgeld Housing community) and the Alderman’s office early on. The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) offered monthly informative meetings about the new school for parents and residents of Altgeld Gardens. Chicago International sent letters to families with school-age children and left information about the new school on residents’ doors. School leaders hosted a community luau in July and opened the CICS Lloyd Bond gymnasium to the community all summer long for midnight basketball for neighborhood children and teens. All of these steps were good ones; community members seemed to view Chicago International as a trusted and industrious partner. However, school leaders were concerned about one key element: enrollment. Applications weren’t rolling in as quickly as expected. “The major challenge was helping the families and parents in Altgeld Gardens and the neighboring community understand how a charter school education differs from public, private and selective-enrollment institutions,” Dr. Purvis says. “Parents just didn’t understand how CICS Lloyd Bond would be of value to them.” Michael Campell, director of the new campus, agrees:
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13 “Altgeld families and parents honestly couldn’t believe that a quality school option would be available to them and to their children, and that [the school] would not be fee-based.” Beyond educating families about the benefits of the new campus, Chicago International faced other challenges: The Altgeld population was at a fraction of its capacity due to community-wide home and ground renovations. And because the new school was under construction, Chicago International was unable to showcase the quality of the new facility to the community. Chicago International needed a new approach to reaching out to families, and in July, Chicago International community liaison Adrienne Leonard proposed a simple idea: train a “street team” to take the message to community members directly, one-on-one, door-to-door, delivered by the community’s most trusted ambassadors—its longtime residents. For 4–5 hours a day over three weeks straight, the Lloyd Bond street team talked to children, parents, grandparents and other family members about what distinguishes Chicago International from the other neighborhood public and private schools. The team found that many Altgeld residents either misunderstood or were not able to understand the original information. “We were able to answer their questions and address their concerns individually,” Ms. Leonard says.
The street team reminded parents that although the school was not fee-based, there was an admission process. The team made sure that parents were aware that they would be required to sign their children up before the first day of school and take active roles in their children’s education at Lloyd Bond.
“Altgeld Gardens is really a small town, and we had to approach it as such,” Mr. Campbell says. Word traveled fast as the street teams chatted with Altgeld residents in their living rooms, around their kitchen tables and on their front lawns. The last monthly community meeting had 260 parents in attendance, and the school was near its full capacity on the first day of school. Looking forward, Chicago International will continue to build on the relationship it has established with the broader Altgeld community. Chicago International and its partners are committed to hiring directly from the community for positions at the school, and hopes that the school’s library will also serve as a “cyber café” where community members will enhance their computer literacy skills.
“We didn’t just upgrade a school,” Mr. Campbell says. “CICS Lloyd Bond is a conduit for hope, change and advancement for an entire neighborhood and community in need.”
Chicago International Lloyd Bond is a $2 million renovation project that transformed Our Lady of the Gardens Catholic School—a fixture on the Altgeld grounds for 50 years—into a non faithbased charter school and the only high-quality public school option for students in this community.
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