Four years ago, in a much ballyhooed move bannered in the pages of both downtown dailies, the Board of Education created Jones College Prep, a high school in the Loop for high achievers. And ever since, the board’s been making the lives of its teachers, students, and staff difficult.
The plan was to simply convert Jones Commercial High School, a vocational school with a long history of preparing juniors and seniors for jobs in downtown businesses, into Jones Prep–a plan that showed Vallas at his best and his worst. It was a good idea to create a school for the booming central city, yet it meant eradicating a fine vocational program, which has never been adequately replaced. In addition, the plan wouldn’t be easy to implement. It required purchasing and demolishing the Pacific Garden Mission, a homeless shelter just south of Jones, and replacing it with a four-story addition that would house a gym, a library, and several fine-arts classrooms. Nevertheless, Vallas predicted that the project would be finished in two years.
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Finally, in the spring of 2001 the board announced that the renovation and construction project would begin with or without the addition–the Pacific Garden Mission still hadn’t been relocated. “Basically, they decided to renovate the old building first, and then figure out what to do with the mission,” says Paas. “Obviously, that meant waiting for our gym, but we were relatively pleased.”
“They didn’t have any real explanations or answers–they made their announcement and told us basically that’s it,” says Paas. “You can imagine what sort of panic this threw us into. The board said they would split up our school for a year. Freshmen would go to Walter Payton, sophomores would go to Whitney Young, and juniors and seniors would be housed at various universities downtown. It was so sketchy–no one knew what was going on.”
The board has been reviewing an alternative plan that would build the addition on a parking lot just south of the mission. “That way we could build our gym and our library without having to wait for the mission to be moved,” says Paas. “Duncan says he’s studying it, but he says he doesn’t want to make a commitment he can’t keep. He says he’d rather underpromise and overdeliver. I guess that’s in contrast to Vallas, who tended to do things the other way around.”
