For months, parents, teachers and community activists have warned that forcing children to pass through some of the city’s more impoverished and dangerous neighborhoods – where some already walking in the middle of the street to avoid being ambushed by gang members – to get to school puts them at undue risk.
Thousands of Chicago children whose schools were shuttered last spring walked to new ones on the first day of school Monday under the watchful eye of police officers and newly hired safety guards there to provide protection as the kids crossed unfamiliar streets _ many of them gang boundaries.
No incidents of trouble were reported, police said. While that didn’t surprise parents and grandparents, they said they were still concerned that the city’s obvious show of first-day force won’t keep their children safe in the weeks and months to come.
“I think it’s just show-and-tell right now,” said Annie Stovall, who walked her granddaughter, 9-year-old Kayla Porter, to Gresham Elementary School, which is about five blocks farther from home than Kayla’s previous South Side school. “Five, six weeks down the road, let’s see what’s going to happen.”
Kathy Miller stood in front of Gresham Elementary with her three children, waiting for a bus that would take them to another school. She scoffed at the Safe Passage program, in which guards clad in neon vests line Chicago streets, saying it won’t be long before brightly colored signs announcing the program’s routes will be riddled with bullets.
“Those signs don’t mean nothing,” she said.
The preparation and show of force shows what’s at stake for Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest school district, after it closed almost 50 schools last spring in the hopes of improving academic performance and saving millions of dollars. About 12,000 of the district’s 400,000 students were affected by the closures.
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