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| Bill McCaffrey, chief of CPS communications, in theory. |
Stories fill the paper, discussing certain issues, visiting various places, introducing particular people. Readers read them, never pausing to wonder how those stories got there.
Some are pitched by eager publicists, but more often a reporter had to press, make phone calls, send emails, cut through layers of bureaucracy, wheedling quotes and permission from hesitant administrators.
I'm not complaining, it's part of the job.
Sometimes it works, and the story gets in the paper. Sometimes it doesn't. I've been doing this long enough to take disappointment along with success. But this one particular experience, well, let me tell you.
Several years ago, I thought about a story I did in 1986 at the Chicago public high school in the basement of the Cook County Jail. It was one of my favorite stories, because of the surprise, not just to find classes being held—teenage prisoners still must go to school—but because the teachers were so positive and enthusiastic, not at all what I expected.
Merely reposting the story here seemed lazy. Most of the teachers I quote are probably dead. I wanted to go back, to re-report it, see what had changed in three decades. I started with Tom Dart. He likes to show off the jail, but on his own terms, and the school didn't fit into his PR program. But gentle pressure, and the passage of a couple years, finally won permission.
There was still a hitch. Though the school is in the jail, it's run by the Chicago Public Schools. You can't just walk in. So I started on the CPS last June, beginning with Judy Pardonnet in their communications office. I figured that gave me plenty of time to get it in the paper when school started.
We eventually had a pleasant conversation on the phone, around July, and permission seemed forthcoming. Then nothing. She wouldn't return my emails or calls, and I tried for weeks. Finally, irked, I began what I call the "demon dialer" --- call her and call her and call her, every hour sometimes. Eventually she picked up.
She was apologetic, and passed the blame up to Bill McCaffrey, the chief of CPS public relations, pictured above. He won't allow it, she said, for reasons mysterious.
So I started trying to contact him. July melted into August which morphed into September. He never responded. He never returned a call or an email. Earlier this month, Forrest Claypool, the head of CPS, came into the newspaper to talk to the editorial board about all the problems in the school system. I sat through 45 minutes of his spin, then approached him as he left and laid out what I wanted to do with the high school in the basement of the Cook County Jail..
He said sure, talk to Bill McCaffrey.
At that point McCaffrey did phone me back, made some positive noises, then promptly disappeared again. I know the schools are in crisis, and there's lots to do. But he didn't have to write the story; all he had to do was give me permission.
For some reason I would not give up. I begged Kelley Quinn at the mayor's office to pressure Claypool—he and Rahm are supposed to be great pals, brother control freaks trying to herd the cats of civic government. I asked the publisher to intervene directly, and he did.
Nothing. Not even a reply. The CPS reaction to my simple, reasonable request for a mundane feature story is perhaps the most unprofessional performance I've encountered in 30 years of Chicago journalism, They lacked the consideration to even say "No" so I could stop asking. Just silence. Weeks and weeks. The September back-to-school moment has come and gone.
I give up, and am posting the story I liked so much from 29 years ago. It was an inoffensive thing, a nod to the hard work that teachers do, day in and day out, in the Cook County Jail. The teachers there now might want to ask their bosses why their efforts could not be showcased in the newspaper.
I shudder to think why it was possible for a young freelancer to write it in 1986, but that months of steady pressure could not replicate it in 2015. We are a nation with freedom of the press, in theory, but that freedom is curtailed and hobbled by fearful government bureaucrats who lack faith in themselves, in their organizations and in their employees, and so gag them, not realizing that the gag is a worse indictment than anything they might say. Those terrified of bad publicity use that fear to bat away good publicity, then wonder why all the news about them is bad.
Bottom line: our American freedom erodes, undermined, not by foreign enemies, but by domestic cogs.
Enough. I tried my best. When Forrest Claypool moves on to his next posting, building his resume for his mayoral run in 2018—Rahm's definitely done after this term—I will try again with the next head of CPS. It's was an interesting story, then, and I bet it would be interesting now.
Until that happy day: This ran in the Sun-Times on August 5, 1986 under the headline, "Headline:Enthusiastic students flock to jail's classrooms behind bars." It's quite long, but that's how we did it once upon a time.
At first glance, the rooms could be any classrooms anywhere.
They have all the right equipment - desks, chalkboards, globes,
handmade mobiles and construction paper silhouettes of Lincoln and
Washington stapled to bulletin boards. Above the chalkboards are green
strips with large alphabets of cursive writing.
If it weren't for the Sheriff Richard J. Elrod calendars hanging
in each room, you might expect a group of laughing fifth-graders to
return from recess at any moment.
When the students do arrive, they are all wearing the lone
school color - beige. They wear the same beige T-shirts and beige
cotton pants. Stenciled on the back of the shirts and the pants are
"D.O.C." - Department of Corrections. This is the basement of the Cook
County Jail, where the Board of Education runs a high school 12 months
a year.
The students are between 17 and 20 years old - the youngest group
in the jail. They attend classes from four to five hours a day in a
broad range of subjects, taught by 50 full-time teachers.
If the cheery, standard classrooms come as a surprise, the
teachers are even more so. Rather than being a burnt-out group of
gritty survivors, filled with tales of the frustration of trying to
teach hardened street toughs, they are enthusiastic to the point of
zeal, and say they prefer teaching in the jail environment to teaching
in the regular public school system.
"My students are the nicest group in the world," said Daniel
Fitzgerald, who teaches during the year at the Nettelhorst School and
spends his summers teaching at the jail.
"If I had this kind of demeanor in the school year, my teaching
would be a breeze. I've been coming here for the past four summers, and
it's a real pleasure. I had a student today thank me about four times
for helping him with a new math problem. All the way to the door -
thanks again, thanks again, thanks again. I would never get that at my
school."
According to Phillip T. Hardiman, executive director of the jail,
teaching positions at the school are in great demand from other
teachers in the school district. Many of the teachers in the jail have
been there for more than 20 years, and few leave prematurely.
"In order (for a new teacher) to get into the jail school, one of
our teachers has to die or retire," said Hardiman.
"Most people have a misconception of what it is like in jail -
they think of bars, inmates with tin cups," said Robert Glotz, director
of security at the jail. "The funny part is (teachers) are far safer
here than in a grammar school or high school."
"We have very, very few discipline problems, if any, here in the
jail," said Andrew Miller, who began teaching in the jail in 1956. "As
a matter of fact, my role as assistant principal is primarily involved
with having each student placed in the appropriate classroom setting.
There is very little disciplining needed."
But because the teachers enjoy what they do does not mean their
job is an easy one. The majority of teens who come into the jail are
dropouts with emotional and developmental problems and reading levels
that average around the fifth grade. They are frequently hostile toward
the idea of school and are lacking in self-esteem. On top of
everything, there is no way to control how long they will be in the
school. Stays in jail range from a few days to two years, with the
average stay being around a month, so the teachers face classes that
are constantly changing.
"You have to be a special individual to work in that setting,"
said John Gibson, who was principal at the school for 5 1/2 years and
is now principal at John Marshall High School. "They're working with a
clientele that puts great demands on the teachers. A lot is taken out
of a person.
"The high turnover is one of the major problems. You may begin to
see attitudinal changes, and then the student is gone. Teachers, like
anyone else, like to see results - it's hard to work with a young
person for three weeks or three months and suddenly that student is
gone. It takes a special kind of person to deal with it."
Gibson said the teachers in the jail have to be sincere,
committed and dynamic because that's the only way to reach the students
in jail.
"Otherwise the students would simply come in and put their heads
on the desk and that would be the end of it," he said, adding that the
enthusiasm among jail teachers tends to be "contagious," passing from
older to younger teachers.
Despite the disappointments often
found in a jail environment, the teachers all have their tales of
success, such as the one about the student who earned his high school
equivalency degree in the jail and went on to graduate magna cum laude
from Northern Illinois University.
And there's the man who approached Andrew Miller in San Francisco,
stuck out his hand, smiled, and said, "You're Mr. Miller. You said
something to me in the basement of the Cook County Jail that changed my
life. . . ."
Even if a student is not reached by the teachers at Cook County
Jail, they hope that perhaps some good still can result from their
efforts.
"Even if we are unable to have the kind of success we expect with
youngsters, we believe that attitudes are being changed about schools,"
said Gibson. "When they begin to experience success in the classroom,
that spills over to younger siblings - or children. Many of them have
children of their own. We know some of this is taking place. It pays
dividends to larger society for years to come."
As far as the classes themselves, they tend to stress practical
information and life skills. Thus, the science class will focus on
public health or drugs, while in history the class learns about such
basic Chicago information as the name of the mayor and the tallest
buildings.
Despite their veneer of street sophistication, the teens in the
jail need this rudimentary information.
"Those great big semi-adults with beards and muscles - they are
fathers, they've committed all kinds of crimes and have all kinds of
venereal diseases," said Miller. "These great big grown men have not
learned the first thing about how to take care of themselves. They
can't put a stamp on an envelope - to put a stamp on a letter you have
to write letters, and they don't write. So they put the stamp on the
wrong corner."
In a recent class, Anthony Picciola had his students answer a
series of multiple choice questions about their feelings - how they
react when in a group, when happy, sad, angry. The class had several
purposes - to get the students to read aloud, to think about
themselves, to learn to discuss their emotions and participate in a
group.
Jesse Lee, the jail social worker, stopped by on his rounds and
gave the group a pep talk.
"You gotta be prepared," he said. "You gotta have a plan."
He walked over to the desk of a student named Bob - a young man
with a thin mustache and tossled hair - and asked him what kind of
sports he played. Bob, in jail on charges of residential burglary
stemming from his $100-a-day cocaine habit, stared at his desk while he
answered - his feet constantly tapping, his fingers drumming on the
table.
He played tight end in football, he said, left field in baseball.
Lee, seizing on the sports connection, made an analogy between having a
realistic game plan and winning the game, trying to get the students to
see the need for foresight and planning in their own lives.
"I don't think you're gonna get a person in here saying, `We're
looking for coke abusers - all the coke abusers line up, we've got jobs
for you.' " Lee said.
"This is what makes the school go, the staff," said Miller. "We
have a fantastic staff. Our social worker staff are just crackerjacks.
Our staff is especially trained to handle the difficult boy. Most of
the youngsters are dropouts who happen to get in trouble with the law.
They come here and, maybe for the first time in his life, someone
listens. For the first time, he has structure and discipline. This is
something he badly needs and, believe it or not, these boys welcome
that."
