#Bullet in a bible attendance full#

Let's start by jumping ahead a little ways into the school year for Act One, Rules to Live By, from Linda. So our reporters today and next week are Linda Lutton, who covers Chicago schools for our home station, WBEZ, like I said Ben Calhoun, from our staff, who used to be a Chicago reporter and Alex Kotlowitz, who's written many times over the years about violence in Chicago and its effect on kids growing up there. And we're going to continue it next week.įrom WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. So what we're going to do is we're going to start our story at Harper this week. So much happened that we could not fit this all into one program. As you'll hear, they devote incredible energy to trying to keep their students alive. And we watched the staff try to recover from the terrible year that they had last year and try to make this year different. They let us into private, difficult meetings with parents and students. When violence struck, they let us record the administrators as the administrators jumped into action.

#Bullet in a bible attendance full#

And they gave us unusual access for more than five months, for a full semester. Harper agreed to let us send three reporters in, starting at the beginning of this school year. And we wondered, what if we spent a long period of time there, to witness what they're witnessing? But when we heard Linda's story about this one school with 27 shootings, at that point, in a year, we thought this is a school that knows this problem in a way that most of us around the country never see, don't know. Shakaki was number 27.Īll of us here knew, of course, about the murders in Chicago. She showed Linda this list that she'd been keeping, for a year at that point, of all the kids who had been shot from Harper. Her murder was such a blow to the staff and the students that even Principal Sanders- who's been at the school for years and is definitely not easy to rattle- even Principal Sanders said that it made her wonder if she could continue doing this work.

Shakaki was shot while standing on a porch talking to a friend near the end of the school year. Here at our radio show, we first heard about Harper this summer, when our colleague, Linda Lutton, who covers education at our home station, WBEZ in Chicago, did a story about the death of a 16-year-old sophomore named Shakaki Asphy, who played on the school's basketball team. Administrators do pick up some kids and drive them to school. This is not, by the way, a theoretical question. Even the security guards- there are 16 for a student body of just 550 or so. Between passing periods, the halls are kept clear. The halls, walls, classrooms, cafeteria- everything is well taken care of. Amidst boarded up houses and vacant lots, it is a four story, yellow brick building. Though, if you're picturing some kind of chaotic, depressing, ghetto high school in the middle of all of that, Harper is anything but. Police statistics show that it is one of the most dangerous areas of the city. The majority are in a handful of neighborhoods, like this one. But of course, these deaths aren't evenly distributed all over the city. Last year the number of murders in Chicago rose while in many other big cities like New York and Los Angeles, it held steady or fell. Last weekend, there was a funeral, 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, an honor student who was shot in a park in mid-afternoon in Chicago, just a week after performing at an inaugural event in Washington. We've all heard so much lately about kids getting shot. On Friday of this week, President Obama went to a Chicago high school and spoke about all the shootings happening in our cities.