Inner-city school being sold to military

[fugue]

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Oct04/Sharkey1015.htm

The article is by a teacher at the school.

We first began to realize something was wrong when teams of teams of men with suits and clipboards began walking through the halls of our high school during the first week of classes. We had heard that the U.S. Navy was planning to open a “Naval Academy” on Chicago’s North Side, but it never occurred to us that they would try to put it in our building. After all, we were already using our building!

Nonetheless, it became clear that the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) was in fact targeting our school after we crashed a meeting at the 48th ward alderman’s office--and discovered that CPS was planning a “community forum” at Senn to sell the idea.

In some ways, Senn High School is a pretty typical “inner-city” school. Ninety-two percent of our students are poor. We don’t have lots of resources, our building needs paint, and our students are not the ones who test into the fancy magnet programs.

But in other ways, our school is a remarkable community resource, with plenty of morale. Our students come from 70 nationalities, speak 57 different languages and still maintain a sense of unity and mutual respect. Senn students have performed 70,000 hours of community service over the past five years and have been recognized with a national service award. Senn has also developed some of the city’s most successful academic programs for at-risk kids.