During his last two years of high school, Parrish Brown Jr.’s gym class was held online — not in the school’s newly renovated gym. Chicago’s public school district had decided to “phase out” Walter H. Dyett High School in 2012 and so, without a teacher to teach, students completed their physical education requirement by taking health quizzes on a computer.
That also meant that Dyett, the only neighborhood high school in the Bronzeville neighborhood, wasn’t accepting freshmen and current students like Brown were encouraged to transfer out. At the time, district officials described the schools like Dyett as “so far gone that you cannot save them.”
“When we first heard it, we were devastated,” Brown recalled. “A lot of us being upset, a lot of not feeling valued, and then also not feeling like we were worth anything.”
I met Brown earlier this year in Chicago at a community Christmas party. He was wearing a Santa Hat and serving hot cocoa and cookies. I told him about the upcoming school closures in Cleveland and some of the students I’d talked to here, and he agreed to talk to me about the similar experience he had as a high schooler more than a decade ago.
When we talked later on the phone, Brown explained to me that Dyett, along with his elementary school and two other schools, were closed in 2012, the year before Chicago Public Schools (CPS) announced a larger plan to close 50 schools.
About this series
Signal Cleveland is covering how a sweeping school consolidation will reshape the future of the district, students and some neighborhoods. We wanted to see what we could learn from community leaders, teachers, parents and district officials in Chicago, a city that closed 50 schools more than a decade ago in 2013. Find the stories here.
Most of the 50 schools, like Dyett, had low enrollment and lower test scores and were in majority Black neighborhoods. They also had names that honored important people in Chicago’s Black history. People like Captain Walter Henri Dyett, a beloved music teacher responsible for mentoring musicians like Nat King Cole and Dinah Washington.
But unlike Brown’s elementary school or the 50 schools closed in 2013, Dyett is open today. It has an enrollment of 510 students. Its graduation rate outperforms the district’s by nearly 10 percentage points and, last year, more than 60% of its graduates enrolled in college. The school still has lower than average test scores, though, and, like many urban high schools, has high rates of chronic absenteeism.
Today, Dyett offers plenty of arts courses, including dance, digital arts and theatre. Its renovated gym is home turf for a state-title-winning basketball team. And, a few times a month, Brown, who is now 29 and a business owner, teaches restorative justice workshops to current students who are mostly teenagers from the neighborhood, kids a lot like him.
Turning into power
Before the final vote to close Dyett, Brown and some of his peers worked with neighborhood groups like the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, a Black community development group that the Rev. Jesse Jackson helped found in the 1960s.
“It turned from us feeling hopeless to knowing that we had a group of people on our side,” he recalled. “We went through organizing training and we were staging our first press conferences. It went from being hopeless to turning into power.”
In 2013, when CPS moved to close the 50 schools, including a number of feeder elementaries to Dyett, it brought attention, and allies, to the student efforts. Over the next few years, students joined by parents and activists from the neighborhood began staging protests and press conferences to keep the school open.
The group, known as Coalition to Revitalize Dyett, also drafted a plan for a neighborhood high school focused on sustainability, green technology and leadership.
Brown remembers that process as laborious but illuminating. They met with researchers and spent afternoons drafting curriculum. They asked local nonprofits to commit to providing extracurricular programming and internships. They even took a bus tour of Chicago to witness the education that students in other parts of the city were getting.
“We wanted to see, well, does CPS actually know how to create a well-performing school?” Brown told me. “And yes, they do, especially on the North Side and in our white counterpart areas.”
In December of 2014, after a number of protests, the district began to consider reopening Dyett. They put out a request for proposals that had an option for contractors to submit proposals to run the school privately – similar to a charter school.
Two proposals were submitted: one by a private contractor and one by the coalition. And then CPS began stalling. It accepted a proposal by a third group after the deadline passed. It delayed the vote on the proposals. For activists, it looked as though Dyett might not reopen after all.
In June 2015, after graduating its final class of 13 students. Dyett closed. Its black glass building at the edge of Washington Park was left dark and empty.
Two months later, in August, a group gathered in the park for what looked like a family picnic. But this group wasn’t eating. Twelve of them, including grandparents, teachers and activists, were on hunger strike. They were demanding that the district reopen the neighborhood school to serve their children. The Coalition to Revitalize Dyett wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
In the end, the strike would become national news and fuel for the campaign to elect Chicago’s school board. The strikers wouldn’t eat for 19 days before the district agreed to reopen the school as an open enrollment, public, neighborhood high school. After that, the strikers would hold out for another 15 days, hoping the district would agree to the focus on green technology, sustainability and leadership.
Dyett reopened two years later with a focus on performing arts.
‘You are worth having a world class education’
Brown thinks the decision to reopen Dyett was a partial victory: the school was open but the district didn’t fully listen to students, parents and the broader community.
On one of my visits to Chicago, he showed me around the school and explained that the history of the hunger strike is only half-heartedly honored. Current students don’t learn about it. The mural commemorating the strikers, a semi-permanent installation, is confined to a basement hallway.
When I asked him how the experience impacted him and his education overall, he told me that he couldn’t help but feel tired. He’d been pulling double duty for a lot of years: fighting to keep his school open while trying to learn.
“It really impacted my education,” Brown recalled. “We weren’t even able to learn for real, because resources were taken out, teachers were not being supported, there were no extracurricular activities.”
And while community organizing taught him a lot, it was hard to be in the spotlight at such a young age. To this day, there are videos of Brown crying and news articles quoting things he said as a teen floating around the internet. He feels that sometimes people have a preconceived notion of him — all because he was a kid who wanted to keep his school open.
At the end of one of our conversations, I asked Brown what he’d tell a teenager in Cleveland whose school might close at the end of this year.
“You are worth having a world class education. There’s nothing that you did that was wrong,” he said. “Don’t be afraid to fight against power. Learn about power. Take care of yourself. Don’t go fighting alone.”
He also reminded them they wouldn’t be the only kids going through the school system.
“Don’t forget to look out for the people that come after you,” he said. “Whether you had the best education, or not, you have to be the one that is going to create the opportunity for other folks.”
