As the hunger strike by Dyett High School activists moved into its 12th day, Mayor Emanuel finally broke his silence on the issue to declare that he wasn’t sure there were enough students on the south side to justify opening another high school.
But now that he’s safely reelected, it’s as though he suddenly discovered there’s no compelling demographic reason to reopen Dyett—what with the school system being broke and everything.
We live in Chicago. And here mayors generally open and close schools as ways to reward friends and punish enemies, demographics be damned.
But KOCO could bring back the saintly Maria Montessori herself to run that school, and the mayor still wouldn’t let it happen—at least not without a fight.
That’s the old Courtenay school, which the mayor closed right around the time he was green-lighting Coonley’s expansion.
And while we’re on the subject of charters, Mayor Emanuel and Mayor Daley had a hand in Dyett’s demise by surrounding it with charters and contract schools, including Ace Tech, Little Black Pearl, Perspectives-IIT Math & Science Academy, Urban Prep, the University of Chicago Charter School Woodlawn, and so on and so forth.
