So? Then where's Oak Park?

You were wondering where Greek Town is, you thought on Halsted south of Eisenhower or thereabouts?  You should have asked Chi Trib’s Pamela Sherrod, who locates “Chicago's predominantly Greek neighborhood near Oak Park.”  Kidding you not, am I.  It’s in an article, “Living lean in a 'stuffaholic' world” as it ran in the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times 1/21/06.

Later, from Len:

Well, it's only 10 minutes on the Ike..

and then there's papaspiros... a neighborhood in itself.
(Not to mention George's, Thyme and Honey, Maple Leaf...)

OR maybe she is thinking about the neighborhood around Assumption Greek Orthodox
Church on [Central] next to Loretto Hospital.., must have been a Greek
neighborhood onceuponatime.

True.

Just kids

Is it possible OP police chief Tanksley would prefer not to have told Chi Trib — “Crime Drops in Oak Park” — that the 61% of OP’s 58 assault victims in 2005 who are juveniles were a case of "kids having a problem with other kids”?  A few years back, one of those kids, son of the elementary schools superintendent, needed eye surgery after being attacked in Whittier playground by kids from Austin.  If reported assaults, as Tanksley said, do not appear to be gang-related, they are something else bad that should not be dismissed cavalierly.

Kids at play

Veronica Micklin, of 1001 Wenonah, has great things to say about neighborhood life in Oak Park.  For a look at “children, independence and play,” she says in a letter to NYTimes, come to

the south section of Oak Park, where we live. My son, who is now 18, still walked over to his friends' homes to play when he was home over holiday break, rather than call them on his cell phone. Here the kids draw with chalk on the sidewalk, ride their bikes and walk to the playgrounds and parks. They play whiffle ball in backyards and throw footballs on quiet Sunday streets. Kids walk to school--grade school, middle school and high school! The sound of a ball hitting the pavement under a garage-mounted hoop is stronger than any ring that can be downloaded!

Readers Respond: Taking the Child Out of Childhood - New York Times

Not everybody loves learning

For a lot of smart kids, they provide confidence and validation that are hard to come by in the day-to-day environment of middle school and high school, where academic skills are seldom on top of the heap in terms of recognition.

That’s Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, in Slate Mag two years ago, talking about spelling bees and other contests and making top-drawer sense.  He reflects problems that were front and center in Oak Park’s elementary & junior high District 97 back when our kids were in school, in the 80s and 90s.  How to validate academic skills, yes.

He said it while reviewing the documentary “Spellbound,” about the National Spelling Bee, but linked it while discussing actress-producer Patricia Heaton’s new documentary, “The Bituminous Coal Queens of Pennsylvania,” about a 50–year-old talent and beauty contest in SW Pa. — Patricia Heaton, of course, having been Raymond’s wife on TV in “Everybody Loves . . .”

The coal-queen film is also about people and coal mining, which “has shaped this area of the country, instilling a strength and pride in its citizens.”

Unhappy in Oak Park

This lady didn’t like it in OP,

the only place [she] ever lived where she didn't feel welcome.

"They were so suspicious of the Eastern establishment," she said. "'Harvard' [her alma mater by way of its women’s college, Radcliffe] was a dirty word. I always voted Democrat, but there was only one other person in Oak Park that I know of who did. I was scared to death to mention it to anyone."

Still years before the Civil Rights movement, [she and her husband, Rev.] Martin [Sargent] — fed up with the racial intolerance they saw around them — began to organize ways to document the racism, mostly by bringing black people in from Chicago and having them try to shop at segregated local malls.

It was a difficult time for the Sargents in many ways, and a time of change. They had their first two children before Martin was reassigned to a church in Foxborough, Mass. — a place where they felt more at home.

This would have been in the mid– to late 40s.  She is Barbara Sargent, 84, interviewed in the Bath, Maine, Times-Record News, “in her stately living room with her dog sleeping on her lap.”  She had grown up in NY City, daughter of a Lutheran pastor in mid-town Manhattan across from Central Park, where a flock of real sheep was tended by a real shepherd.

In Massachusetts “they felt more at home.”  Then there was Maine and Paris, France, where she thrived.  They got to know Martin Luther King.  She got over her Oak Park experience, apparently, which is nice.

Pro-choice is best

 ... when it comes to education

By JIM BOWMAN

January 4, 2006, Wednesday Journal of OP&RF

Columnist Jack Crowe says let’s talk about school [Viewpoints, Dec. 14]. OK, don’t blame me. It was his idea. He has middle schools in mind-public, or government, schools. The latter is preferred by ex-UIC Prof. Herbert J. Walberg in his and Joseph L. Bast’s Education and Capitalism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America’s Schools because they are funded and run by government agencies. That’s a cruel and heartless way to refer to our beloved school staffs and leadership, but let’s do it this once.

Let’s also put an interesting question: Can government schools be competitive? They must be, you say. Most kids go there, don’t they? But they are a monopoly as to funding, and we have found that monopolies do nothing for competition. Remember Ma Bell?

Competition happens, however. Ask any real estate broker selling a neighborhood. This is school-to-school competition, aided and abetted by published test scores. It happens within schools, too, in the choice parents have about middle-school subjects-typing? chorus? art? French? Spanish?-and even about teachers. There could be more of this: you could have homework classes and non-homework classes. Parents could choose. This would be a pro-choice program that even conservatives would approve.

Or teachers could declare for phonics or not, and parents could choose. Or for drilling in fundamentals vs. enrichment. For memorizing poetry or not. As freshmen at Fenwick in 1945, we memorized poetry-"The stag at eve had drunk its fill, where danced the moon on Monan’s rill," "I wandered lonely as a cloud," "‘Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,

But spare your country’s flag,’ she said." And much, much more. Our lives were never the same. Mine wasn’t, anyhow. We gave speeches, too; every freshman took speech, like it or not.

In this pro-choice environment, teachers would still run classrooms, out of which parents could butt. But parents would choose this or that in general terms. They’re the ones who have to live with the kids anyhow. Let them decide.

Some do it already, big time. They say no to government schools, paying their money and taking their choice at schools called Grace or Ascension or Calvary [No: Oak Park Christian Academy is the day school at Calvary church: better here wld be Alcuin or Waldorf, to name two].  Others skip school buildings completely, like Cindy Miller, on Wesley Avenue. She and her husband Jay and other couples do it themselves. Jay, an engineering consultant, teaches physics. Cindy’s friend Pat Larson teaches Latin and history. Cindy teaches literature. As many as 15 kids might be in a session, from five families. These are mini-schools, or as one observer put it, "private schools on the cheap."

The kids get out, as to see "Nutcracker Suite" at Morton East High School. The Millers’ oldest is an Eagle Scout. Their oldest daughter has taken acting classes at Village Players; she’s in her second season as a Lyric Opera supernumerary. Another son is pitcher and shortstop with a local traveling team. Another daughter takes violin, another guitar.

Home-schoolers’ reasons run a gamut. For the Millers, members of Calvary Memorial Church, where home-schooler parents meet regularly, "the Christian element" is the big thing. Cindy Miller has found it’s "good to cater to" each child’s progress. The experience has also been good for "family dynamics," which in their case are super-dynamics-the Millers have nine children, from two to age 19.

The nine have been home-schooled since birth. She and her husband, unsure at first, were willing to try it. If it didn’t work, they were willing to pack their first-born off to kindergarten. So it went with the other eight: schooling began when they were born. It progressed seamlessly. As for truancy issues and the long arm of the state, which in some places can be quite intrusive, Illinois law is liberal in the matter. Home-schooled kids are to be taught core subjects in English for a required number of days, but no reporting is required. It’s a fairly pro-choice environment.

Perils of home schooling in Joliet

Egad!  The ink hardly dry on my Wed. Journal column due out tomorrow (if my tardiness deadline-wise does not delay it), which I close with reference to Illinois’ liberalism in the matter, not prosecuting home-schoolers for truancy, I hear from the Home School Legal Defense Assn. (HSLDA) about a Joliet family hauled into court: 

In Illinois, homeschoolers only need to teach the same branches of instruction in the English language that are being taught in public schools . . . ever since an important state Supreme Court case [in] 1950 [that gave them private-school status].

Nonetheless, certain school districts tend to demand more of homeschoolers than is actually required by law. . . .  The Will County Regional Superintendent's Office sent a truant officer to contact the [Walters] family.

He said the kids — all four but one “chronic” — were truant.  HSLDA complained immediately, but the truant officer went to the local prosecutor, who charged the family with truancy. He said the chronic required "supervision." HSLDA found the truant officer in violation of a statute requiring written notice of truancy before charges were filed. The father asked for a continuance, the judge refused, not allowing the father even to ask.  The kid had to be in school the next day.

The mother went to the district the next day.  Once the regional superintendent saw she had a teaching certificate, lesson plans and plenty of books and was told of the truant officer’s failure to file proper notice, he called the state's attorney and got the case dropped.