Lessons from a Chicago school merger: Race, resilience and an end-of-year principal resignation

Ogden International School in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood.  

As the adults around her worried about what and how they would teach, Kiara Caref had a simple concern: Would she connect with the new kids?

At Ogden International School, which last fall merged with nearby Jenner Academy for the Arts, Kiara’s friends were mostly white and middle-class like her. Jenner students were mostly black and from low-income families.

But the seventh-grader found herself building new bonds this school year. “I’m not going to grow up only being friends with people who grew up like me,” she said.

Ka’Mayra Boyd, another seventh grader, was worried that the sense of community she had enjoyed at Jenner would not survive the merger.

A year later, she says she’s disappointed that a Black History Month celebration didn’t take place at the merged school. “But it’s getting better,” she said, especially social science classes that have taught her more about civil rights and qualitative research methods..

Kiara and Ka’Mayra were two of 1,340 students from Chicago’s Near North Side who lived through an unusual and high-stakes initiative this year: a community-driven effort to meld two schools — racially, economically, and culturally distinct — into one. The merger comes as Chicago continues to grapple with a litany of public education challenges, including declining enrollments and racial and socioeconomic segregation.

In a series of interviews this school year, Ogden students and teachers told Chalkbeat Chicago they felt like the merger was headed in the right direction.

Then, during the last week of school, Acting Principal Rebecca Bancroft announced she’d be leaving the school.

“Ending the year in this way is a blow,” said Jezail Jackson, a first-grade teacher who also sits on the council that helps govern the school. “It feels like two steps forward and one step back for the school community.”

A “community-driven merger”

Merger talks began in 2015. Ogden, with an international focus and a diverse but largely affluent student population, was bursting at the seams. Jenner, 98 percent black and predominantly low-income, wanted to stanch an enrollment decline that nearly got it closed in 2013.

Those dynamics emerged in part from the schools’ adjacent but very different attendance zones. Ogden’s spanned much of the Near North Side and included a diverse swath of mostly affluent families. Jenner’s much smaller zone was confined to the area around the former Cabrini-Green projects, where many low-income black families continued to live in row homes. However, the demolition of the Cabrini high-rises meant that there were far fewer children in the zone to enroll at Jenner.

The geography created a unique opportunity to bring the schools together. Parents, school officials, and community leaders crafted a plan: They would use all three buildings — the two that Ogden already used, and Jenner’s — to serve both sets of students.

That proposal reflected something new for Chicago, which had closed or merged more than 170 schools, often abruptly and despite fierce community opposition, over the previous 20 years, in efforts to manage declining enrollment and chronic underperformance. Instead of having a bureaucratic solution imposed on them, the Ogden and Jenner communities remained in the driver’s seat.

“This was more of a community-driven merger than [Chicago Public Schools] saying we’re closing this school and moving it into that school,” said first-grade teacher Deborah Sheriff, who has been through three campus mergers during her CPS career. “And this is the first merger that CPS has really been involved in two or three years before the merger happened.”

The process wasn’t easy, and opposition sprouted in both school communities.

But ultimately, in February 2018, the Chicago Board of Education signed off on a merger plan. Students in both zones would go to one building together until fourth grade, then another for middle school. And students in both zones would be able to go on to Ogden’s well regarded high school.

In the years before the merger, the two schools shared field trips, a parent diversity committee, and training meant to help teachers work with students from different backgrounds. They also got a $1.8 million grant from the city to ease the transition.

The result: The school that opened in September 2018 is among the 10 percent of Chicago public schools with no racial majority. In a city where the majority of schools are racially segregated, 37% of Ogden students are black, 30% white, 16% Asian, and 15% Latino. Its families span the economic spectrum, from Gold Coast to public housing residents.

When 12-year-old area resident Jacari Brown arrived at his new school in September, he found “nice new teachers, wonderful kids,” he said. “I even made some new friends right off the bat,” he said. And the classes? “Compared to last year, I’m not even going to lie — they are way better.”

Ngozi Okerafor chose the school so that her son would be surrounded by students from different backgrounds. On her son’s first day of kindergarten, the Nigerian-American lawyer was pleased to see that he had Indian, Chinese, Nigerian, African-American, Latino, and white classmates. “They will appreciate diversity if it is celebrated,” she said.

A ‘fractured’ community

But a series of challenges and missteps would undermine that work. The problems began when Jenner Principal Robert Croston, who had helped engineer the merger, died of illness at age 34 in March 2018, just after the plan was approved. That fall, shortly after the school year began, the district suspended Ogden Principal Michael Beyer for allegedly falsifying attendance records.

In December, the school’s acting principal, Rebecca Bancroft, said in her monthly leadership report that Ogden was a “fractured” community.

The Ogden International School of Chicago.

While the planning committee had worked to treat the two schools’ concerns equally, the Jenner name wasn’t added to the merged school. And sheer numbers gave Ogden more influence. That school had four times as many students as Jenner in elementary school.

That meant that the majority of teachers in the merged school were from Ogden. Most were white, in contrast with Jenner’s mostly black staff. And one popular black teacher at Jenner, Tara Stamps, whose family has a long tradition of activism and organizing in Cabrini Green, had not made the move. She had applied to be an assistant principal but didn’t get the job.

Ogden voices were front and center on the new school’s Local School Council, too. The one representative from Jenner, Kizzy McCray, quickly began having doubts about participating in the leadership group. Accustomed to Jenner meetings where attendees would more freely talk and seek solutions, she said she wasn’t used to the tightly run Ogden LSC meetings.

“I got tired and overwhelmed,” said McCray, who is Ka’Mayra Boyd’s mother. She stopped attending meetings — leaving the former Jenner community without an official voice until she was voted off the council for excessive absences.

Inside the school, despite the training on classroom management and social-emotional learning that teachers had received, black students were being disciplined far more often than their classmates — something that research shows is a problem across the country.

In the first semester after the merger, the school issued 41 suspensions. Thirty-five were for black students, meaning that black students were being suspended at more than twice the rate expected given their share of the student population.

The divide became even clearer — at least for the former Jenner students — in February.

That’s when Jenner had traditionally organized an extravagant Black History Month assembly. Another highlight was a black history fair with student presentations about African-American leaders, inventors, and famous former residents from Cabrini Green.

This year, the fair didn’t happen, leaving Jenner families feeling left out.

‘Something that was lost in this process’

City education officials said they hope McCray’s sentiment can be avoided in future school mergers.

“To me it matters more that you’re telling me that a parent felt like it was a closure or a takeover,” said LaTanya McDade, CPS’ chief academic officer. “And if they felt that way, then that means there was something that was lost in this process.”

McDade said a forthcoming parent engagement plan will ensure that former Jenner parents have ample opportunities to volunteer and to participate in school events. In another move that pleased Jenner families, the school recently hired Sheena Croston, Robert Croston’s widow, as a counselor.

Getting it right will be important for the city.

CPS enrollment is predicted to keep shrinking, which means fewer families to draw from. New Mayor Lori Lightfoot has said she wants to pursue alternatives to closure.

Lightfoot has said, though, that if schools do have to close or merge, the decision to do so should be community-driven, as happened at Ogden.

For now, any lessons emerging from Ogden’s first year are tempered by Bancroft’s abrupt resignation, announced Thursday in a letter to families. CPS declined to offer details about her move and she did not respond to requests for comment.

With Bancroft’s resignation effective June 30, the Local School Council must scramble to choose someone else to steer the merged school into its second year. Whoever takes over the job of managing Ogden’s three campuses will face a long to-do list. The school has 18 vacancies to fill this summer, including several positions added to support the merger such as an instructional coach, business manager, and a family and community communications liaison.

CPS officials say they want to help.

“It is very important to the district and me that Ogden’s next principal continues the progress your community has made over the past two years,” McDade wrote in a letter to Ogden families. “The district will collaborate with your elected Local School Council over the summer to identify an acting principal who reflects your values and priorities, and is ready to support the continued growth of your school community.”

Also standing by: the school’s students, who came together this year in remarkable ways.

This month, Chicago honored the Ogden-Jenner Student Voice Committee for its work promoting a positive campus culture. The committee designed and built a room where students feeling stress can get a break and some support.

Members of the award-winning Ogden student voice committee (from left) Dajae Allen, Jacari Brown, and Kiara Caref

Eighth-grader Dajae Allen recently told a crowd at a civic honors ceremony that, at the beginning of the school year, there was “an unsaid wall between the two school communities.” But bit by bit, she said, students took it upon themselves to break down that barrier.

“We were experts on what it means to be students at our school,” Allen said, “so we needed to lead the way to advance the health of our new school community.”

Those efforts, and those of her colleagues, leave Jackson, the first-grade teacher, optimistic about Ogden’s future.

“I know that we are all very very hard workers, and our hearts are in it,” Jackson said. “We have to work harder to ensure this success. These obstacles that keep coming, they cannot be the end all be all for us. They just can’t be, because we all just deserve more.”

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization covering public education. A longer version of this story can be found here. Sign up for Chalkbeat newsletters here: ckbe.at/newsletters