For eight years the Chicago
The inspiration for CYSF came from Ron Chez, Sheldon’s brother, who went to Niles Township High School in the mid-1950s. “I was a dismal student,” he says. “I had no intention of going to college, and I got into my share of trouble–fights and things. I was not a pleasant person. About the only reason I stayed in school at all was because of sports–baseball, wrestling, and football–and my coaches.” But Chez turned around, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Illinois in 1962 and going on to become a wealthy businessman.
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Chez also believed strongly in holding the recipients of CYSF money accountable. Each high school had to fill out lots of forms on budgets, plans, and events. A couple of schools, including Lincoln Park, dropped out of the partnership for a time because of all the paperwork.
She says there were also financial problems. “When I took over we were in arrears. We owed the schools money, and to correct that we hit up everybody we could.” When she noticed that her brother’s demands for accountability had turned off school administrators, she simplified the reporting procedures. She also began spending more time in the schools. In 1998, at the suggestion of schools CEO Paul Vallas, CYSF joined forces with Project PACE (“promoting academics through curricular enhancement”), another private-donor organization that had been funding music, art, and sports at Englewood High School and at five grammar schools whose kids would go on to Englewood. CYSF/PACE had a budget of $600,000, including $150,000 contributed by the school board. It was now serving 50 schools, 6 of them elementary schools, under the direction of Sheldon and Lori James, who’d headed up Project PACE.
“I coach frosh-soph football,” says Martin. “One year my kids were really into Notre Dame, but they didn’t know what Notre Dame was except that they had a football team. Anyway, some mentors got some money, and on a Saturday they took my team to South Bend. It was an off weekend for the football team, but that didn’t make a difference. Some of these kids had never seen a college campus. They met players and even the Notre Dame president. I can’t tell you how impressive that was for them. All those kids graduated from Clemente, and some went on to college, though none to Notre Dame.”
Nevertheless, Davis consulted with several principals about what they thought of CYSF/PACE. “They were very positive,” she says, mentioning in particular the enthusiastic response of Marshall High School principal Don Pittman. But she still believed that budget constraints wouldn’t allow the board to provide further funding, and wrote Sheldon a letter explaining her position.
Davis responds that in the 1999-2000 school year the board gave $5 million to high schools for equipment, musical instruments, and uniforms, and it’s giving a total of $1 million this year–all distributed on the basis of need. In addition, each high school can get $10,500 for clubs and another $40,000 to $50,000 for after-school “academies” that offer tutoring and recreational activities. And there’s extra money for transportation to chess, band, and sporting events. “We are meeting our responsibilities,” she says. “If there’s a recreational need, we fill it.”
