Friday, March 27, 2009
News / News Bites Walter Payton Prep publishes Cabrini-Green issue
Posted by Michael Miner on 03.27.09 at 09:22 AM
To their credit, it occurred to the student journalists of Walter Payton College Prep that an important question to ask about nearby Cabrini-Green was whether their own fancy new school sticks in the residents’ craw.
For as the Payton student paper, the Pawprint, reports in its most recent issue, the story of Cabrini-Green is now about demolition, gentrification, and displacement. “The people and the culture of Cabrini-Green are slowly being phased out,” write Julian Antos and Danielle Bennon, “leaving the few thousand remaining residents struggling to make do with what’s left of their homes. . . . The poster child of the transition from a ghetto to a Gold Coast neighborhood is inarguably Walter Payton College Prep, a school filled with good intentions . . . but a school that Edna Morris, a security guard at Schiller [Elementary], thinks of as an outfit that sits in the community but doesn’t make an effort to be a part of it.”
Antos (a junior) and Bennon (a senior) draw a contrast between Payton, just northeast of Cabrini at 1034 N. Wells, and Schiller, in the heart of the project. “CPS thinks of a school with 35 kids to a classroom, no library or special ed. classes, and no art programs as a well-run institution,” Schiller vice principal Brian Billings is quoted as saying. Payton is another world. Someone from the Department of Children and Family Services comments, “You should see the look on a kid’s face when he sees a new school going up in his neighborhood and he realizes that they won’t let him in”; and Antos and Bennon add, on their own authority, “For better or worse, Payton is part of a movement to phase Cabrini-Green out, making the building all the more frightening to local students.”
Faculty adviser Jonathan Miller had wanted for years to see the Pawprint tackle Cabrini-Green, and each fall he'd propose the idea to his new staff, but it always daunted them. Last spring Miller had a better idea; just before the school year ended he assembled this year's staff and said, let’s put out a Cabrini-Green issue next February. With a whole summer to get up to speed on their subject, the students felt excited instead of apprehensive, and Abby Klionsky, the incoming editor, passed out assignments.
“People didn’t know much about Cabrini except what they’ve read in history books,” says Klionsky, “that it was one of the worst housing projects in the country.” The Pawprint didn’t intend to leave it at that. Payton has maintenance workers who grew up there, and a few students from the neighborhood. The grandmother of senior staff reporter Logan Cotton lived there most of her life. “As soon as they heard there was community and people love their community,” says Klionsky, speaking of her staff, “people got really into it. There was a lot of enthusiasm to go out into the area and talk to people.”
The issue's 28 pages long, it's mostly Cabrini-Green, and I'm greatly impressed. There's a focus on pop culture that in a student paper feels totally right -- recollections of the 1975 movie Cooley High and hit 70s TV show Good Times, both by writer Eric Monte, who grew up there, and the 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams. The 1992 slasher movie Candyman and Daniel Coyle's 1994 memoir Hardball (which was turned into a movie) are cited. As for Cabrini-Green's place in the nation's psyche, despite Monte's advocacy, senior Lee Sova-Claypool writes that "the image of Cabrini-Green generated by the media was of an unlivable environment filled with endless violence and incredible poverty."
The Pawprint dwells on vanished Cooley High, the neighborhood high school long before Payton, but a school that was actually for neighborhood kids. "It gave the teens a sense of community and established that deep connection to Cabrini," write junior Chelsea Brown and sophomore Melissa Wojdyla. "When Cooley fell [in 1979], so did that bridge of community to the kids. The people we spoke to had a glimmer in their eyes, or an excitement in their voice when the name Cooley was mentioned."
“Why Cabrini-Green?” asks senior Marissa Carroll's introductory essay to the 28-page issue. “It is our duty to highlight . . . a community that we all too often overlook. . . . Perhaps this issue will inspire you to volunteer for the Cabrini-Green Tutoring Program, to rent ‘Cooley High,’ or simply to step out of your Starbucks comfort zone and think about life on the other side of Division.” Aware that the Cabrini-Green issue barely scratched the surface of its subject, Miller and the underclassmen on his staff intend to return to it next year.
Here's a PDF of the complete issue.
I had a chance to speak to Carroll and Klionsky. Carroll hopes to land in a good journalism school, while Klionsky, after a gap year in Israel, wants to study international relations somewhere to prepare herself to be a foreign correspondent. "I’ve been noticing the Reader's coverage in past weeks that journalism is dying," Klionsky says bravely, "but people will always need news and they’ll always want to be informed." If journalism has a future, I hope they're it.
Comments (2)
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I applaud the PawPrint to ask for feedback. I hope these comments to taken in the spirit they are given--so that the writing and articles can be improved. Journalists are expected to be responsible and objective in their analysis of news and to refrain from biases. The Science Fair Extravaganza story by Abby Klionsky was the best. It was factual. Many of the other articles were opinion pieces and today's journalism is full of opinions, hence why journalism is declining and now everyone is an amateur journalist on blogs and webpages. It's because so much of the "journalism" out there are either opinions or advertisements. Or memoirs. I wish the authors of the PawPrint issue called Cabrini Green would focus on current issues and have a broader, more balanced reporting style that would be considered balanced and fair journalism, not just opinions. I want current interviews with today's community members. Maybe you might want to have printed a parent's guide on How to Help Your Child Achieve Academic Success helping their kids would help Edna Morris, the security guard who asks, "what has been set aside for them (referring to her own kids)? Why is there a sense of entitlement here? Why didn't anyone interview all sorts of people for their articles, like victims of crime, residents, merchants, visitors and students from other schools? Logan Cotton's article ("The Rock and The Rose") was pure nostalgia. Not very forward looking for a cover story. We end up with alot of historical info, and not a lot of vision for today's generation. I would prefer to hear from Logan his/her own perspective of growing up. I hate to still see, hear or read that today, there are people who still compare themselves to newer residents because it fosters an "use versus them" attitude that does not help build a community of caring people. Even the comparison of those commuting Payton students in the neighborhood to those students of the other school, Schiller, is not helping anyone. I believe any person who enters the community, spends time in the community, is a part of the community, regardless of where they live, where they came from.Shame on the authors and people who propagate the schisms and not emphasize enough of the need for unity. Curtis Cooper's death is a tragedy. Mirisa Carroll's story is an opinion piece called"Why Cabrini-Green". What ever happened to balanced journalism? Mirisa said that government is to blame for Curtis Cooper's death. How about the fact that his death is a tragedy? His mother was not with him, was there any adult supervising Curtis? That's what I wonder. Also, I also disliked the graphic of a weapon in the ad for the "A-47 A is for AK47: A concert to Save A Child Soldier". Why not have a picture of a human being? A picture of a child soldier, which is the focus of the money and efforts to help? Not a weapon. Pictures of people are more impactful than a weapon.
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Good. Keep adding to the discourse kids. Put your heart out there and never let the sting of criticism prevent you from stating the facts or the real voices of real people caught in the struggle. As for opinions? This piece was trying--these kids were trying--to pull a reaction out of somebody. That's what opinions do. Opinions have a place in journalism, and many are only now realizing the damage done when opinions are completely blotted out. Leaving them out is like the refusal of various administrations to show the flag draped coffins of our fallen soldiers. Nobody gets as mad as they would have or should have, and desperate wars linger on. PC never added anything to the discourse but apathy. It's sad to think there are those who like the whitewash CB Neighbor's comment shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the paper's intent. CBN is asking the kids to write a paper that had nothing to do with the Pawprint's intended readers--high school teens. We're not talking about a community newspaper here. If you are creating a highschool paper, it's got to be relatable to the kids who will be reading it . These kids would have little or no cause to write about parenting--so the logic of the suggestion reflects a deep misunderstanding of the entire premise. I am amazed at the commitment of these kids to find the relatable issues-like music and history--and their efforts to root out the failures and false promises from those organizations--fed, state and city--who should have fixed a certain hazard that would have eventually befallen another man, woman or child had it not hit this innocent child first. Even if a parent were right there, there may have been no way to hold off a several hundred pound iron machete. I applaud these kids for making an effort, when so many had difficult school work, long commutes, sports and family commitments to be simultaneously accommodated. I'm going to guess it's because they really cared. The future of journalism will be very poor indeed if this passion fails to make the voyage.
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