MEDIA WATCH: Wall Street Journal gives balanced story on Whittier library fight
On October 1, 2010, the Wall Street Journal published a balanced story on what has become the most important national news out of Chicago — the struggle of Whittier parents and community for a real library for children at the Little Village elementary school that serves primarily Mexican American children and their families. Since the Whittier parents began their occupation of the Whittier field house i mid-September, the public has been treated to a series of lies and evasions by the Huberman administration at Chicago Public Schools. But as the sit-in has persisted and the facts have been able to come out in the middle of the CPS spin, more and more people are turning toward support for the Whittier parents. Prior to the sit-in, most people, even in Chicago, did not know that more than 100 Chicago elementary schools do not have libraries for their children. Much more will come out as the sit-in continues.
Parents, children, and supporters from the community held a meeting (above) to discuss the future of their protest immediately following the withdrawal of more than 30 Chicago police on September 17, 2010. Following a day-long standoff, the small group of parents who had been threatened with arrest for continuing to occupy "La Casita" were reinforced by more than 100 parents and children who swarmed across police lines and hopped the fence to help out, despite orders from CPS officials that everyone inside the building would be arrested for trespassing. The above photo was taken by Substance during the key hours on September 17 when community-wide support had swarmed into the area and thwarted both the lies being told by CPS officials and the massive show of police that had been taking place the entire day. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.In addition to the print story that appeared on October 1, the WSJ has also provided its subscribers with video and audio materials from its reporting on the story. The print story appears below:
Parents Enroll in Protest....Sit-In Stymies Chicago School's Plan to Demolish a Run-Down Community Hub (By JOE BARRETT, Wall Street Journal, October 1, 2010)
CHICAGO—Araceli Gonzalez is getting used to spending restless nights on an air mattress inside a run-down building behind her daughter's elementary school.
"They think we are going to get tired of this," she said Tuesday night, explaining her morning dashes home to prepare her children for school and herself for her job at a bank. "They're giving me more strength."
Ms. Gonzalez, 46 years old, is among dozens of parents at Whittier Dual Language School who have been holding an around-the-clock sit-in for more than two weeks to prevent the city school district from tearing down the roughly finished one-story building, which has served as a community center and after-school activity hub for decades.
School-district officials say the building, in a poor Latino neighborhood southwest of the Loop, is unsafe and would be too expensive to bring up to current building codes. "It's not even a building. It's a structure," said Monique Bond, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Public Schools. "It would need to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up." There is no money for that, she said.
Since the protest began, the parents have been accepting donations of books and working to convert the 2,000-square-foot building into a library for the school, one of 160 in Chicago that doesn't have one. On Thursday, the parents dedicated the library, despite the orange sticker on the front door warning that the building was "Off Limits" and threatening fines of $25 to $100. At a time of school-budget cuts and teacher layoffs, parent groups across the U.S. have marched on school-board offices, staged call-in campaigns and shouted down administrators at school-board meetings. But it is rare for parents to go to such lengths to protect something that looks from the outside like a long-deserted Pizza Hut.
The building, which dates to the mid-1800s, has been maintained haphazardly. The red metal roof is rusting. Huge broken flood lights on the roof are missing guide wires. The concrete floors have chipped paint and the walls and ceiling are neither insulated nor fireproof.
But the building has long been a focal point for the neighborhood. Rose Escobar, 55, who attended the school and later sent her children and grandchildren there, remembers playing games, carving pumpkins and having Christmas parties there.
"I hate to see it torn down," she said, as she dusted off and disinfected a set of donated encyclopedias. "I don't think it's fair to the kids at the school."
More recently, the building has served as a meeting place for students' mothers to take classes in sewing and English as a second language. They call it the "casita," or little house.
Fourth-grader Osvaldo De Paz said his mother has taken English classes there, while he studied English and Spanish at school. "Then it's fair," he said, as he sat doing his math homework in the building this week, "because it's more like equal."
Last year, the school district said it had received $1.4 million of funding for improvements at the school. In consultation with parents, it expanded the cafeteria, built new science and computer rooms and installed a parent meeting room. But the parents balked at the plan to spend $356,000 of the money to knock down the building.
“"I hate to see it torn down. I don't think it's fair to the kids at the school.” Rose Escobar "We thought we could put that money to better use," said Gema Gaete, a community organizer working with the parents. And because the school had no library, the idea emerged to create one, she said.
In a series of meetings since last November, the district and the parents failed to reach agreement. Ms. Bond said the cost of tearing down the building and replacing it with an acceptable library could be $5 million to $20 million. Parents say the $356,000 already allocated would go a long way toward upgrading the building because they can call on free labor from workers in the neighborhood.
Finally, with a looming school-district deadline for boarding up the building, parents decided to take it over on Sept. 15.
After initial confrontations with police and school officials, the parents have repainted the building, organized health fairs and yoga classes and slept in shifts.
"This is Chicago," said Ms. Gaete, recalling Mayor Richard M. Daley's 2003 decision to carve giant X's in the landing strip at Meigs Field as the city slept. "Whole airports can disappear overnight."
No talks are under way between the parents and the district, which hasn't agreed to conditions set by the parents.
Meanwhile, donated books have streamed in from as far away as Minnesota and New York. A group of high-school students from New Orleans recently pledged to hold a book drive, Ms. Gaete said.A group called the Chicago Underground Library offered expertise on cataloging and setting up the library. The parents have cataloged about 600 books in the library, and hundreds more need to be unpacked. Osiel Gomez, 9, said he is looking forward to checking out books from the library. "We keep on reading the same books," he said of the small collection in his classroom. Asked if he had taken a peek at the offerings before the new library opened, he said, "I want to be surprised."
