Warning shots

SIGN LANGUAGE At a March 29 rally at the Thompson Center, an antigun activist assembles next to classroom desks representing the shooting deaths of 20 Chicago Public School students.

Photo: Shmura Campell

At last week’s antigun rally following the death of 18-year-old Chavez Clarke, Mayor Daley, Gov. Blagojevich and Chicago Public Schools president Arne Duncan called for legislators to pass stricter gun laws. Clarke, shot March 29 in the parking lot of Simeon Career Academy, was the 20th CPS student to die from gun violence this year. But some Simeon Local School Council (LSC) members say those officials should put pressure on the school’s administration to beef up security, something the LSC has been doing for more than a year.

“I brought it up at every Local School Council meeting that we needed more safety and security,” says James Kelley, chairman of safety and security for Simeon’s LSC, which meets monthly.

“Even the teachers came to the LSC meetings to discuss safety,” says Minister Sylvia Jones, LSC secretary. “I can’t remember a time when it didn’t come up.”

Police say one of the two students charged in Clarke’s murder brought a gun to Simeon (8235 S Vincennes Ave) knowing security was lax on Saturdays.

“Monday through Friday, I would say we have the school 100 percent staffed—about 12 officers,” says Simeon’s assistant principal and head of security, Sterling Bolden. (However, when we visited the school on a Thursday as classes were letting out, there was no security in sight and we strolled right past metal detectors without being inspected.) On Saturdays, Bolden says, teachers and school administrators “serve in that capacity,” manning the patrol desk and metal detectors.

LSC meeting minutes and security reports show the LSC stressed issues of security to Simeon Principal Tamara Sterling, who, LSC members say, has been unresponsive to the requests for more measures. In October 2007, Simeon finally added two security guards, the result of an entire year of appeals, according to a summary security report Kelley filed with the LSC. “My position is now, and it has always been, that the safety at Simeon is always the last thing on the agenda, starting with the principal,” he says. (Although we met with Sterling during our visit to Simeon, she would not go on the record.)

During a safety and security committee meeting in December 2006, Andres Durbak, the director of the Office of Safety and Security for CPS, upbraided Sterling for not following proper procedure in reporting critical incidents during that school year. Those incidents, according to the safety and security meeting minutes, include “multiple fire alarm pulls, a student being assaulted and battered by another student and the assault of the head of security.” By keeping incidents under wraps, Sterling placed Simeon in false high standing with the Office of Safety and Security, Durbak alleged. In the meeting, he told Sterling that not reporting the incidents hindered his office’s ability to correctly determine Simeon’s security needs and respond to serious issues at the school.

One of the incidents in question is the December 2006 rape of a 16-year-old girl. The girl’s mother says two male students sexually assaulted her daughter, at the time a sophomore at Simeon, off school grounds. The mother says her daughter kept the rape a secret from the family, but told school administrators, including Sterling and Bolden, who were unresponsive, the mother says. It wasn’t until her daughter finally revealed the crime to her a month later, the mother says, that she and her husband had Chicago police arrest the boys at Simeon. The family of the girl, who relocated to the suburbs after the incident, have taken legal action against the Chicago Board of Education.

“Because [the case] is under investigation, we’re not at liberty to discuss that,” Bolden says.

Upon seeing the story of Chavez Clarke on the news, the mother called her daughter into the room. “She looked at me, shook her head and said, ‘Mom, you told them this was going to happen,’” she says.