“What we are trying to do when we establish the school, if we design it correctly, it will be a school serving diverse students, Asians, Black, Latinx, and White. But the focus will be on bilingual education.”
It was a tight 4-3 vote, an indication of how controversial the plan is considering that residents of Chinatown, the South Loop and surrounding communities have been asking for a new school for decades.Mayor Lori Lighfoot’s all in to give it to them. But now that there’s political momentum, and some $60 million ready for the project, some of those very same advocates are skeptical, Grace Chan McKibben among them.
“It’s a ghost town in Wendell Phillips High School,” Green said. “What we need to do is make sure that they have bilingual programs, bilingual educators because that’s how we actually foster an environment where multiple ethinc groups can come and enter school buildings and learn together.”that a new high school on the Near South Side would hurt students at the existing local schools.
“What usually happens is they build this shiny new school and say, ‘Hey this is the school that everyone should go to. This is the school that has a long waiting list because all the parents want to send their kids to,’” Green said. “That undermines these schools like Wendell Phillips and Dunbar and then they say their attendance levels are low and then they shut them down … We have these massive buildings that can filt twelve, thirteen-hundred kids right next to their neighborhood.
Dowelll, whose ward would host the new school, said she has and will advocate for more investment at Phillips, Dunbar and others, but it’s high time for a Near South high school. “From everything like residential use, bars, entertainment … The idea of Motor Row is to become more of an entertainment district within the city of Chicago.