Daley, Durbin toast pre-K, adult ed center

• Ed Finkel
• September 7, 2006

• Print
• 
• Contact us

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., were on hand Aug. 30 to celebrate the dedication of a facility that will expand critically needed early childhood and adult education options in East Garfield Park.

Housed for the past five years in the Alain Locke Charter Academy at 3141 W. Jackson Blvd., the Family Resource and Learning Center has moved to a refurbished building next door. Renovated with a grant from the Mead Witter Foundation, the new space opens on Oct. 1.

Alain Locke began with pre-K through first grade classrooms in 1999 but has expanded one grade each year and now fills all of its classroom space.

“This facility will help children to learn and families to learn, and we will be a better nation for it,” Durbin said of the center, which receives a federal Even Start grant. “It’s very important for us to sit down with schoolchildren. It’s a very grounding experience.”

The family center will contain three classrooms for early childhood education, ages six months to five years. The program, a feeder for Alain Locke, will be expanded from 30 to as many as 75 preschoolers, said Deana Spencer, program director.

Adult education, too

The center will have two rooms for adult basic skills training and GED preparation, which had been housed in the charter school’s library, allowing expansion from about 15 to 50 adults, Spencer said.

The center subcontracted to the De La Salle Institute’s Tolton Center for adult education. The organizations will work collaboratively on parenting education and parent-and-child-together classes.

Area residents will benefit greatly from all of the above, said Mayor Daley. “We’re telling them, ‘Bring the young children. Bring the parents.’ We’re going to make this a learning center for all ages,” he said. “We’re going to compete in the global economy, right here on the West Side of Chicago.”

Part of quality-of-life plan

LISC has contributed $15,500 worth of computers and other technology equipment to the effort, which addresses two issues raised in the East Garfield quality-of-life plan, said Mike Tomas, NCP director at lead agency Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance.

“Principals kept mentioning early childhood education, [saying]: ‘These kids are coming to school not prepared,’ ” he said. “We started connecting the dots.” Adult education received even greater emphasis in the NCP plan, Tomas added.

Emma Ranney, a 1992 graduate of John Marshall High School and mother of three children at Alain Locke who has attended the adult education program, said she needed the brush-up to help her children with their math and reading homework.

“I’d like to thank all the teachers because they have been an inspiration,” she said. “When we learn, our children learn.”

New opportunities

Such opportunities have been tough to find – or fund – in East Garfield Park, said Vonyell Foster, enrichment coordinator and parent community liaison for Alain Locke and an NCP quality-of-life task force member. “East Garfield is really under-served. You’re always trying to scratch for [funding],” said Foster, who continues to serve on the community’s open space and education committee that grew out of the NCP effort.

“I’m happy that this center is giving an opportunity for families to grow with their children. … The earlier we reach the children, the more we can close the gap between the haves and the have-nots.”

Most parents in the neighborhood are working-class people who don’t often have the opportunity to spend time in class during the regular school day with their children, Foster said. “You don’t have the flexibility to say, ‘I want to leave work for an hour to go to my child’s school.’ That isn’t happening.”

Pat Ryan, Jr., founder and chairman of Alain Locke Charter Academy – named after the first African-American to become a Rhodes Scholar – said the integrated center makes a great deal of common sense but was tough to pull together given the myriad government funding streams that go toward its various component programs.

 “We are the first school to have done this. It sounds so obvious,” said Ryan, whose school can boast of having the highest gains in test scores in Chicago Public Schools from 2002 to 2005. “Schools used to be the center of a community in a way that, somehow, we have lost along the way. You have to take a 360-degree approach.”

Daley said he hopes other schools will follow suit. “That’s (what) Ren 2010 is all about: You do not allow anyone to stand in your way to get a better education,” he said, referring to the Chicago Public Schools’ Renaissance 2010 program to revitalize individual schools. “It gives me great confidence that other schools can follow. If you can do it here, any other school can do it in the city of Chicago .”

Browse NCP articles related to

Adult education, Education