MCKINLEY PARK — Evergreen Academy Middle School isn't quite fighting for its life, but school leaders say concerns about its future loom large.
"When you've got something good, you don't want to always worry about what's going to happen down the road," said Marian Strok, the school's charismatic, high-energy principal for the past eight years. The local school council just renewed Strok's contract for another four years.
Evergreen has seen dips in enrollment in recent years. This year, its lost about 20 students.
That's troublesome because of the district's per-pupil budgeting system, which awards a fixed amount of money per student enrolled. Middle schools already get less per student than elementary and high schools, and the cuts have resulted this year in the loss of an algebra teacher.
Meanwhile, two McKinley Park charter schools, Namaste and Horizon Science Academy threaten to take ever-bigger bites out of Evergreen's enrollment. Horizon is run by Concept Charter Schools, a Des-Plaines group that's fallen under federal investigation for allegations of white-collar crimes.
Strok said she doesn't have the marketing budgets that the quasi-public charter schools have, so school leaders are rallying to bring attention to the Southwest Side middle school.
"My concern is about playing on a level field," Strok said.
But she said any money she could use to market the school would be better spent paying for special programs like bringing in acrobats and science-based laser shows.
"It's not that I don't think it's worth it [to advertise] the school, but I want what we do here to sell itself," she said.
Middle schools in Chicago, commonly defined as containing grades 6, 7 and 8, are a rare breed in the city, which has only 12 such schools.
Two more middle schools contain extra grades, and other elite middle school "Academic Centers" are designed for seventh and eighth graders looking for guaranteed placement in selective enrollment high schools.
While some education leaders say it's a good idea to limit the the number of transitions students make while enrolled in a school system, Strok sees it a different way.
The gangly, uniformed pre-teens who roam the middle school's halls are in a crucial stage of their lives, one that deserves loads of exclusive attention that only middle schools are uniquely positioned to give.
"Here, they're getting solid attention all the time because they're all we've got," she said.
To that end, Evergreen offers an abundance of in-school and after-school clubs and activities. There's a full roster of sports teams, an annual field trip to Washington, D.C., an "eco-warriors" group that cleans up Chicago beaches, a computer coding club and a "gentry club" for boys learning to become young gentlemen.
"Some of these boys don't know how to shave or take care of their hair," said Paul Kanelos the eighth-grade social studies teacher who leads the boys' group.
Strok and others say middle schools have another major advantage in that they prepare students for life at much larger high schools.
Evergreen, for example, sends most of its 150 or so eighth-grade graduates to Kelly High School, with its enrollment of nearly 2,300 students.
To help prepare, the students get shuffled around to different classrooms and wear ID tags, just like they would in high school.
But the students, for now, are part of a much smaller environment. Strok points to the results of a recent survey where students reported feeling safer at the school than anywhere else.
"Every problem we seem to handle is about the weekend baloney that goes on in the neighborhood. [The students] know they can come in here and talk to me," she said.
Earlier this year, school leaders bought a shipment of ChromeBook laptop computers to augment its existing computer lab. The purchase was made possible by using the pool of money reserved for substitute teachers.
But most of Evergreen's teachers didn't use their allotted time off, instead choosing to devote their time to students.
Kanelos, the social studies teacher, sums up Evergreen this way:
"There's a lot of competition out there. We want to see where we stand with everyone else because we think we're a pretty good school," Kanelos said.
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