Kenosha News
Monday
Nov 13, 2006
As if Tremper High School wasn’t big enough, the students and staff are inviting more than 750 kids to join the family.
“I’m calling them my family,” said Donald Jackson, principle at John McDonogh High School in New Orleans. “Because anyone who reaches out to you in your time of need, that’s what family members do.”
It was Todd Hardy, Tremper soccer coach and special education teacher, who put his school together with New Orleans’ McDonogh, which now counts 762 students from five of the city’s 15 pre-Katrina high schools as part of its enrollment.
Hardy, whose wife Marie, once lived in New Orleans and makes frequent trips back, heard from a friend on a recent visit that McDonogh was in rough shape even one year after the hurricane. He spent a day painting and cleaning around campus.
“It was really neat because I got to work alongside some of the kids and see how much they were willing to do,” Hardy said. “Our motto here is ‘Student learning no matter what,” and I told them that they have been through a ‘no matter what’ like nobody else.”
“We know they have the fire and drive to make something happen,” said Tremper senior Chris Kulvik, a general manager of Home Court, Tremper’s school store.
A group of students dubbed the Fyre Youth Squad held a press conference on the school steps in October in an attempt to bring attention to conditions at “John Mac.” There were no doors on girls’ bathroom stalls, no hot lunch and drinking water problems. Teachers and texts books were in short supply, though the school had more than 25 security guards.
The state, which took over the New Orleans school system, worried about moldy books and decided to empty the school library.
Many of the students are living in New Orleans without their parents, who have yet to come back. It’s made for a chaotic atmosphere at McDonogh, though Jackson said his school has turned a corner since early October.
It is, however, still much the same John Mac. Students who relocated briefly to Texas and Tennessee and New York have had a taste of the kind of public schools they never knew possible.
“You feel the experiences of our kids going into another school system and saying, ‘Hey, these kids have a video production lab and an animation lab and an Olympic-size swimming pool,”” Jackson said. “Then they ask themselves, and then us, ‘Why doesn’t my school have any of this?””
Hardy and Tremper’s advanced marketing class are embarking on an open-ended relationship with McDonogh.
“It was students from McDonogh who said, ‘We want better,’ and students from Tremper who want to help them get that,” Hardy said. “It’s not an adopt-a-school thing. It’s a partnership.”
Hardy recently presented Jackson with a $1,200 check from Tremper students.
“They wanted to know how we got all that money together so quickly, and when I told them it came from our school store – that that’s how we raise a lot of money for Tremper – and they decided that could really help their school, too,” Hardy said.
Eventually, the Tremper marketing students would like to give McDonogh students a hand in person.
“It’s not just about how many checks we can wrote,” Chris Kulvik said. “We’d like to go down there and help them get their own school store together.”
Tremper is already collecting books – fiction, non-fiction, how-to texts and whatever else they can get their hands on – to repopulate McDonogh’s library, and has already pulled in commitments from libraries at Carthage College and the University of Wisconsin-Parkside.
Tremper soccer and softball teams are also working on school supplies. The music department is looking for instruments, music stands, and other items. An Army recruiter and Tremper football coach Frank Matrise are working on athletic equipment funding. Hardy’s brother Chris has pitched in his construction company’s 28-foot trailer to haul Tremper’s donations south on Nov. 28.
“We were blessed that Todd would walk through our door with so much offer,” Jackson said.
But, as Hardy insisted, it’s not just John Mac that stands to benefit.
“If you saw what these students had to deal with after Katrina, you’d think we were in a different country,” said Jackson, who plans to visit Tremper in the near future. “I think they have a wealth to offer them about resiliency and dealing with tough challenges while keeping your ideals. They have made that their focus, changing the culture in the city.”
“They’re demanding an education,” said Oscar Gollaz, Tremper senior and another Home Court general manager. “They want to break this chain, to make their school a school that people want to go to. We’re ready to help.”