When students at the Center need help with math or physics, they know which tutor to go to — Michael Quiroz, 21.

Michael is a tutor through the University of Chicago’s Neighborhood Schools Program and has been working at Sue’s for one year. At the U of C, he [...]]]>

Michael works with Cameron in his notebook.

When students at the Center need help with math or physics, they know which tutor to go to — Michael Quiroz, 21.

Michael is a tutor through the University of Chicago’s Neighborhood Schools Program and has been working at Sue’s for one year. At the U of C, he is studying anthropology, but here at the Center he has found his niche developing a math curriculum for both elementary and advanced math students.

“This summer we’ve been preparing for the school year by creating a math curriculum. Basically, it’s a set of different lessons that we can move through during the year, things they will need for the classroom that they might have missed out on.”

With some help from fellow tutors, Michael organized the curriculum by coming up with sub-topics for students to learn and designing worksheets. Tutors can adapt the curriculum to the individual kids they are working with. He said the algebra section is more structured so students can build the foundation to understand higher mathematical concepts.

Michael said about the Center, “I think Sue’s is a great place. My first impression was that everyone looked like they’ve known each other a long time. It was a tight knit community. During the school year, I realized it was a really organized, tightly functioning place and I think it’s good that the kids can experience that. Personally, I really like working here because it allows a lot of creativity and I like kids. They’re really fun, but at the same time I can tell that they value their education. I haven’t met a kid here who doesn’t work hard.”

Michael is now considering joining the Peace Corps after graduating.

For one week in July, a dozen children from the Center traveled to Sawyer, Mich. to experience camp life at the Help Us Grow (HUG) Camp. The camp was held at Tower Hill Camp Site from July 11 to 17 and featured group activities like archery, drama, batik [...]]]>

Sherron, 15, gets a taste for sand.

For one week in July, a dozen children from the Center traveled to Sawyer, Mich. to experience camp life at the Help Us Grow (HUG) Camp. The camp was held at Tower Hill Camp Site from July 11 to 17 and featured group activities like archery, drama, batik and dance. SDCC tutor Jill Glenn from the Chicago School organized students to attend and spent the week with them in Michigan.

All of the kids were provided scholarships to attend the camp though Tower Hill’s Camp Fund and the following sponsors: Jeremy Giacomino, Vanya and Mark Weglarz, Gail Gill, Debbie and Chris Snyder, and Becky and John Simpson.

“I enjoyed all my activities, which included Fun with Science, Wall Climbing, Tennis, Adventure Course, and Waterball. But my all time favorite was tennis. They also served the best food ever! I liked dinner the best. I liked the fact that we had big sisters. My big sister’s name was Amanda. She was really nice. I can’t wait to go next year,” wrote Tyra, 10.

Sherron, 15, wrote, “I met more people and made new friends. I have more friends now then I had before. We played games with each other. I did drama, softball and hiking. I helped people when they needed help. I had a good time at camp and will love to go again!”

The Children’s Center was featured in the latest edition of The New Yorker in an article profiling current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Carlo Rotella’s story recounts Arne’s history at the Center and how it shaped his pursuits in education.

Rotella describes Arne’s time growing up in Hyde Park, playing [...]]]>

Image from The New Yorker website

The Children’s Center was featured in the latest edition of The New Yorker in an article profiling current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Carlo Rotella’s story recounts Arne’s history at the Center and how it shaped his pursuits in education.

Rotella describes Arne’s time growing up in Hyde Park, playing basketball with neighborhood boys and attending the Center after his days at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. At the Center, Arne was able to experience a different side of growing up on the South Side. “It’s been a huge part of my motivation, the difference between the day”–at the Lab School–”and then the evening with kids who had something that wasn’t even close,” he said in the story.

Other memories Arne describes in the article are when he tried tutoring a B student for the A.C.T. who turned out to be illiterate, and when he found out some of his friends from growing up at the Center had died.

“There’s a photo of our group, the inner circle from my mom’s program,” taken back in the late nineteen-seventies, he said, “and some of those guys are dead. Growing up down there, and having friends from the program and from the streets die when I was twelve, thirteen–that scarred me. It was hard to comprehend. As much as the success stories have shaped me and given me hope, those deaths might be an even bigger motivator. The guys who got killed were the guys who didn’t finish high school. It was literally the dividing line between you live or you die. Nobody who went to college died young.”

Rotella writes that President Obama has allotted Arne more than seventy billion dollars in economic stimulus funds to give to states, more than any other Secretary of Education has ever had, giving him “the potential to be a uniquely influential Secretary of Education.” From Arne’s experience at the Center, he takes away these lessons from the South Side:

“It shows that the states are so high [...] Education predicts disparities in life chances, outcomes, life income, and the disparity has never been starker. I do absolutely see–the dividing line in our society is around educational opportunity, more than around race, even though the two are obviously related. Educational opportunity increasingly divides the haves and have-nots, who’s contributing to society and who’s a weight on society.”

Rotella also interviewed Sue Duncan and Kerrie Holley, a former Center alum and current I.B.M. Fellow. Kerrie, who grew up at the Center, describes the problems they had with gangs.

Speaking of Kenwood, Holley said, “It’s better now, but I remember physically having to watch my back. It was risky, dirty, unsafe. And you had to know what time of day it was. You had the Disciples, the Blackstone Rangers.” The Blackstone Rangers once firebombed a church whose basement Sue Duncan’s program occupied. “It was face to face,” Holley said. “She’d say, ‘You can’t come in here. You gotta leave.’ But the gangs respected it. She’s here. She’s doing what she’s doing. She won’t back down.”

Sue started the Center after teaching a Bible-study class at a black church in Kenwood and discovering none of the children could read. She raised her three children at the Center (Owen is currently Assistant Director) and became a familiar figure in the neighborhood driving her big blue van. Rotella writes, “Sue’s moved from one church basement to another growing larger and becoming more deeply involved in the lives of the children who attended.”

From the article:

“Sue Duncan has taught poor kids at her after-school center on Chicago’s South Side for 48 years. She says her son Arne spent seven days a week there as he was growing up.

‘It was absolutely formative,’ Arne Duncan, 44, said of working with his mother. He learned that ‘kids from totally [...]]]> Read the story

From the article:

“Sue Duncan has taught poor kids at her after-school center on Chicago’s South Side for 48 years. She says her son Arne spent seven days a week there as he was growing up.

‘It was absolutely formative,’ Arne Duncan, 44, said of working with his mother. He learned that ‘kids from totally dysfunctional home situations, total poverty, can do extraordinarily well if we give them a chance.’

What he absorbed matters because Duncan is now U.S. education secretary, in charge of improving a public school system that ranks below those of other developed nations in some studies. He’s armed with $100 billion in stimulus money from his friend, President Barack Obama, more than twice the budget of any of his predecessors.”

Assistant Director Owen Duncan writes in the introduction, “In this collection we find, as in any book of children’s writings, the beautiful next to the mundane, the fantastic mixed with the gritty–but there is a deeply troubling undercurrent here. These [...]]]> This year’s writing project, DANGER, explores the theme of violence in neighborhoods, schools and homes.

Assistant Director Owen Duncan writes in the introduction, “In this collection we find, as in any book of children’s writings, the beautiful next to the mundane, the fantastic mixed with the gritty–but there is a deeply troubling undercurrent here. These children offer us few illusions: they know the evils of human nature; they know their world is not safe.”

The annual writing project offered children the chance to tell stories from their own eyes and practice writing deeply and vividly. One student, Serenity, even produced a video based on her story, “Danger.” Click here to read the book online.

“Sue taught me how to learn,” Raven said.

Watch more of the interview on Charlie Rose’s website.