Save Dyett.

From Progress Illinois:

Chicago education activists are ramping up their fight to save Walter H. Dyett High School from closing at the end of the 2014-2015 school year.

At a news conference at City Hall on Monday, a coalition of parents, students and South Side community leaders blasted Chicago Ald. Will Burns (4th), whose ward includes Dyett, for not supporting their proposal to keep Dyett open beyond 2015 and transition it into a “global leadership and green technology” open-enrollment, neighborhood high school. Toting signs reading “Stop disinvesting in black children,” members of the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett High School called the alderman’s lack of support for their community-driven, academic plan “disrespectful” to the families who live near Dyett and accused Burns of “ignoring” the needs of neighborhood children.

The Chicago Board of Education voted to phaseout Dyett, located in the city’s historic Bronzeville community, back in 2012 due to poor academic performance. Dyett is slated to close completely in 2015 after its last senior class graduates.

For several months now, the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett High School has urged Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and school district officials to accept the group’s blueprint to offer a global leadership and green technology curriculum at Dyett. The coalition’s plan, developed over a two-year period, also includes programs involving agricultural sciences and cultural awareness. Blacks in Green, the Chicago Teachers Union, the Metropolitan Tourism Council, Teachers for Social Justice as well as parents and students from Dyett and its feeder schools helped produce the school proposal.

The coalition has collected some 700 petition signatures in support of the community-proposed high school, which is also backed by the DuSable Museum of African American History, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, the Washington Park Advisory Council, the Chicago Botanic Garden and the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) College of Education.

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2 thoughts on “Save Dyett.”

So often Chicago schools are named after individuals who have no relation or meaning to the students who attend them or to the communities in which the sit. Not so with Dyett. Check out his history as a public school teacher and his service to a community much larger than the Southside of Chicago.