As Jacqueline Edelberg spent time with her four-year-old daughter and three-year-old son in the Wendt play lot, at 667 W. Roscoe, she says, “I found myself asking the old question: Where are you going to send your child to school?” Other mothers watching their toddlers were asking the same thing.
None of the mothers took seriously a fourth option, Nettelhorst, at 3252 N. Broadway, which Edelberg passed every time she went to the play lot. “It was odd, because everyone passes it all the time but no one had been there,” she says. “Someone might mention it–like, ‘Are you thinking of sending your kid there?’ And someone else would laugh and say, ‘Oh no, not Nettelhorst–that’s a terrible school.’ Or they would tell you, ‘Oh no, that’s going to be made into condos.’”
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In August 2002, a year before Edelberg’s oldest child was ready for preschool, she and another play-lot mother, Nicole Wagner, paid a visit to Nettelhorst. “We just dropped in and asked to see the principal,” says Edelberg. “That first visit made all the difference in the world.”
Most important, Kurland wanted their help. “I want to recruit parents like Jacqueline and Nicole,” she says. “Every school is looking for that something special that can turn it around. Each school wants to do something special to win back the community.”
The list included restocking the library, enriching the curriculum, and cleaning up the building. “A lot has to do with impressions,” Edelberg says. “You have to get people in the door–and it’s hard to do that if the doors are painted brown and locked.”
“What we want to do is have our neighborhood preschool parents enroll their children in kindergarten,” says Kurland, “and then on to first grade and second grade and so on.” A similar preschool program at Blaine, at 1432 W. Grace, has encouraged many neighborhood parents to send their children there. “Jacqueline told me, ‘You have a lot to offer. People just have to see it,’” says Kurland. “She said, ‘Bring your preschool show to the playground, let them see what you have.’ So I went to that playground. There were more babies there than I’d ever seen in my lifetime. I told them that I wanted to make Nettelhorst a great place. I don’t have to do this–I could retire tomorrow. I’m doing this because I love it. It’s my dream.”
The parent volunteers don’t want to be seen as snobs. “We’re not changing Nettelhorst’s mandate,” says Edelberg. “It’s supposed to be a neighborhood school. It will always be open to everyone who lives in the neighborhood. And contrary to what people may think, Lakeview’s filled with people of all colors, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds–which you can see if you just look at the preschool. We don’t want to change that. We want diversity. That’s why we live in the city in the first place.”
