By Linda Lutton
But you probably haven’t. That’s where Wade comes in.
The elections were big: there were 17,000 people running for 5,400 seats on the new councils, with about three candidates for every parent seat, four candidates for every community seat, and two candidates for every teacher seat. More than 312,000 people came out to vote.
Deanes was elected to two councils in ’89. “Prior to that, we were trying to get African-centered curriculum at Prosser [high school],” he says. “The teachers were like, ‘What are you talking about? We’re not gonna do that shit.’ Well, once we had the authority to change curriculum we said, ‘Yes, we are now.’”
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Today, Deanes heads the school board’s Office of School and Community Relations, which administers the LSC elections. “The LSCs were about changing the attitude of disrespect,” he says, a photo of the late Mayor Washington on the office wall behind him (his must be one of the few city offices without a photo of Mayor Daley) along with the same wall map of the system Wade has, though Deanes’s isn’t marked up. “Before, when principals were appointed by central office, they wouldn’t respect parents. You never got to see the principal. The first principal I ever had interaction with–he was very, very old. His practice in the later part of his life had been to come to school and just go into his office all day. Central office didn’t know because they didn’t care. They put him there and they walked away.
“We knew we could never sustain that level of activity, that it would regularize and normalize,” says John Ayers. “But now we have a whole new generation of parents and community activists who need to learn about this possibility. People have a new shot at this.”
The Urban League has tried to recruit parents to run at 23 south-side schools. But at two separate meetings in late January, no parents showed up; Urban League staffers munched the cheese and crackers intended for potential candidates. “We’ve tried flyers, phone calls, we’ve visited schools,” says the Urban League’s Katherine Raglin. “I guess we’re gonna have to come up with some different strategies.”
