catalyst-chicago.org

Fenger High School will use more than half of the $500,000 grant promised by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in October after the beating death of Derrion Albert to provide more support to teachers in how to manage students without harsh punishments.

Leah Marshall feared the worst when one of her students, Jermaine, became homeless his senior year. As a teacher on the South Side, Marshall had seen even the best and brightest of students fail classes or drop out when faced with difficulties outside of school.Jermaine, however, would not join their ranks. Marshall opened up her classroom to Jermaine during the after-school hours, giving him a quiet place to complete his homework and study.

“He had an adult who was there to listen, and he had a space in which he could decompress,” Marshall says.

Jermaine is now enrolled in a community college in downstate Illinois. His story inspired Marshall toward an ambitious goal: To open the city’s first public residential school for underprivileged students.

Twice a week, students walk into Peggy Foley’s classroom at Kelly High School in Brighton Park armed with homework, ready to break up into groups divided by subject areas. Math is on one side, history another. Tutors mill around and check the work. But instead of looking for correct answers, the tutors check for something else: The students’ homework is to develop questions about their schoolwork, as a strategy to help build critical thinking skills.