It is not just COVID-19 that afflicts the DePriest community. This year is on pace to have the most murders in Chicago since the nineteen-nineties. So far, five hundred and thirty-eight people have been killed in the city, an increase of forty per cent over the same period last year. On August 19th, a nine-year-old boy and his mother were shot and seriously injured on a street eight blocks from the school, when two men stepped out of a car and fired into a crowd at lunchtime. Chicago has also seen peaceful protests against harsh police practices, as well as scattered nights of looting that have made national news. “Every morning, I look at my phone and look at the TV to make sure nothing has happened to one of our kids,” Geverola told me. “If it did, I’m on e-mail.” Geverola, who turned forty in March, attended Chicago Public Schools, and started her teaching career at DePriest. (She moved to other roles within C.P.S. before returning to DePriest, in 2013, to develop an International Baccalaureate program.) She often thinks about the years of limited resources and low expectations in Austin, a long-suffering area that Lightfoot promised to help during her 2019 election campaign. “When you’re in an environment where you haven’t seen much success, it’s crippling,” Geverola said. “I want them to be proud to know that this is their school.”
Chicago operates the nation’s third-largest public-school district, reaching more than three hundred and fifty thousand students in six hundred and forty-two schools. The administrative layers are many. It is not unusual for Geverola to receive a dozen e-mails a day from the central office, describing policies and offering guidance. And yet, despite the vastness of the system, or maybe because of it, principals have considerable autonomy. Countless decisions on staffing, budgeting, and the shape of the curriculum are Geverola’s to make, and she knows that much of the blame will fall to her if things go sour. Now in her third year in charge at DePriest, she has harnessed a network of volunteers, tutors, and funders to think creatively and deepen the school’s coffers. Working with grant funding and shifting money among DePriest accounts, she has continued to increase the school’s stash of Chromebooks and iPads to several hundred. One summer day, as she stood in a library storeroom among shelves stacked with copies of “Charlotte’s Web,” “The Old Man and the Sea,” “The Hate U Give,” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” she explained that books are a precious commodity for a school like DePriest. “My job,” she said, “is to figure out how to push these out to families and not panic if I don’t get them back.”
The abrupt shutdown of Chicago Public Schools, announced in March by the Illinois governor, J. B. Pritzker, a Democrat, was messy from the start. On any given day, barely half of the city’s students logged into their Google accounts for school, according to C.P.S. figures. The numbers were lowest for Black students. Many children didn’t have pencils or notebooks. Others didn’t have reliable Internet service or computers, although Chicago officials raced to deliver a hundred thousand devices to families. Few parents had the luxury of supervising their children’s virtual educations all day. This was particularly true in working-class Austin, where many parents were classified as essential workers and expected to report to their jobs.
Almost no one had taught online before or thought about how to virtually engage elementary-school children for an entire day. Suddenly doing so was “a little scary, a little bit unreal,” Vivian Billups, a teacher at DePriest, recalled. With only one week off after the school year ended, she plunged into a summer class with what are called “diverse learners.” Several students had reading deficits, one had suffered a brain injury, another had severe vision problems. One student was unable to connect to class with a computer, so Billups arranged for delivery of a work packet every two weeks. Finding that students did not have supplies, she drew on donations from World Vision, a charity, and filled book bags with pens, notebooks, glue, pencils and sharpeners, paper clips, and coloring books. She gave away books that belonged to her children and shared a YouTube recording of “Bud, Not Buddy.” Getting creative, she kept three computers running at a time. The one in the living room was “homeroom,” which included the meeting room for third graders. The one in the den was for fifth graders. The one on the patio was for fourth graders. She walked among the real rooms and brought the students together in homeroom from time to time.
Billups, who grew up nearby, learned that structure and expectations were essential. She started summer school at 8 A.M. sharp. When students did not show up or failed to return from a break during the first week, she made sure that their parents knew. A computer program allows her to monitor what students are doing on an assigned screen. (Student: “I’m working.” Billups: “Why does the computer say you haven’t even opened the lesson?”) Students missed their friends, but several told her that they could concentrate better at home and were glad not to have to worry about bullies or what to wear. A summer student with poor vision turned out to be a voracious reader. At home, she didn’t feel self-conscious about using a big magnifying glass. Billups also often found it easier to talk about current events. Amid the demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, she asked her students, “Do you know why they’re protesting?” They didn’t. She pressed a few keys, found CNN, and shared interviews with Floyd’s relatives. “I was able to connect students with real events,” she said.
