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Dyett Reopens With $14.6M Upgrade A Year After Hunger Strike Stops Closure

By Sam Cholke | September 1, 2016 3:50pm
 Dyett High School is reopening to students on Sept. 6 after originally being slated for closure over the objections of school advocates that staged a 34-day hunger strike to get the school reopened.
Dyett Reopening
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GRAND BOULEVARD — Chicago Public Schools officials and the new principal on Thursday showed off what Dyett High School for the Arts will look like when the school reopens to students on Sept. 6.

Beulah McLoyd, Dyett’s new principal, on Wednesday showed off the $14.6 million in upgrades to the school, which in 2015 was the subject of a 34-day hunger strike by 15 school advocates trying to reverse CPS’ 2011 plan to phase out the school.

Last fall, CPS announced it would reopen the school and McLoyd was joined by Janice Jackson, chief education officer at CPS, to show how the district had come through on the first of its promises for Dyett.

McLoyd and Jackson walked through the halls of the school at 555 E. 51st St. showing a wing devoted to the arts with a dance studio, a room set up with sewing machines for textiles and classrooms with theater lights for technical theater classes.

Another wing of the building is devoted to the school’s new innovation curriculum, with a classroom with 33 new Mac computers and a green screen for lessons on video production.

“I’m so excited,” McLoyd said. “You feel like you’re giving birth to a baby.”

Jackson said, so far, enrollment in the school is above expectations and 150 students have enrolled when 125 were originally projected.

The school was slated for closure in 2011, in part because of declining enrollment. During its last full year under the phase-out plan it had only 13 students in a building designed to handle more than 1,000.

Four of the advocates who participated in the hunger strike said outside the school Wednesday that they are happy to be so close to having the school open again.

“We were never against art being in the school, we were against being locked out of the process,” said Jitu Brown, an organizer with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization and one of the 15 members of the Coaltion to Revitalize Dyett that participated in the hunger strike.

He said he and others from the protest have been able to collaborate with teachers in the school on a curriculum that highlights the history of the Bronzeville community and the school’s place in it.

“I am a history teacher and the history of this school is amazing,” said Quinton Clemons, the school’s new history teacher, who is in his second year teaching high school. “I kind of feel like I’m part of history.”

Brown said he and others from the hunger strike are still frustrated that CPS will wait until 2018 before holding elections for a local school council.

Jackson said it is CPS policy for new schools to have a parent advisory council until there are at least three grades of students enrolled at the school.

Jeannette Taylor, another hunger striker, said she is holding off on enrolling her freshman daughter in Dyett until she sees how open administrators are and how inclusive the school is of parents and the community during its first year.

Dyett reopens to 150 freshmen at 8 a.m. on Sept. 6 with nine teachers and one paraprofessional.

Class sizes are expected to be 28-30 students and the school is now expected to eventually enroll 800-900 students, according to Jackson, up from an estimated 550 last fall.

A spokeswoman for CPS was not immediately able to provide a breakdown of how the $14.6 million was spent on Dyett.

 

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