Parents of Fenger Students Seek Community-Designed School

Chicago - Community for Safe Passage is putting their feet on the street and their names on the line.

“We’re gonna have at least 5,000 or more signatures,” said Cheryl Johnson, with Community for Safe Passage.

Signatures the Community for Safe Passage hopes will add weight to its demands that Chicago Public Schools open a neighborhood school in Altgeld Gardens -- a school they said was taken away from them when carver became a military academy.

“We wanna take Carver back. Right now the children have to go to school five miles away,” Jitu Brown said.

Fenger High School is five miles away from Altgeld. And parents there complain that it forces their kids to negotiate a dangerous shooting gallery of gang turf and neighborhood rivalries.

“There are countless examples of kids being displaced and then spikes violence in those schools,” said Brown, who is with the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization.

These parents said Derrion Albert was a victim of violence triggered when kids are forced to leave their neighborhoods. They say Carver is already there.

“We don't wanna eliminate the military school,” Johnson said,” but it's underutilized -- 512 pupils, but has capacity for 2,100 kids.”

But CPS officials said they have their own plans for that Carver building, a Chicago international charter school to serve grades 6 through 12.

“It has received Board approval to open in the fall of 2010,” CPS spokeswoman Monique Bond said. “That has always been a more permanent solution to address some of those issues that were in the community.”