Soft jazz music floats through the checkered hall of Little Village Lawndale High School Campus to signify the few minutes left before classes begin. On a cool Monday morning in October, students pass through the vast glass entranceway, take off their bags and walk through a metal detector. Police officers in navy blue uniforms stand by, cautiously watching the students fill the campus.

The students branch off into the four separate high schools within the large building: Multicultural Arts; Infinity Math, Science & Technology; World Language; and Social Justice. As they walk through the halls, the students barely notice the officers; police patrols and metal detectors have become a common sight in Chicago Public Schools and schools across the country due to the increase in youth violence, school shootings and gang crime.
In the Little Village and Lawndale communities on Chicago’s southwest side, violence is a particularly big issue. “We had an excessive amount of students killed in Chicago Public Schools last year, the highest number in many years dying from gun violence,” says Linda Becker, a Social Justice teacher who has taught in various Chicago schools over the past 10 years.

In the past two weeks, there were three gang-related incidents. The first was minor—two students of different races fighting. The second was much worse, as two large Chicago gangs, the African-American Gangster Disciples and the Latino 26s, chased and physically assaulted a group of students during a conflict.
After that incident, students began asking members of the administration to walk them home so they wouldn’t have to go through gang territory alone. The following day, Principal Rito Martinez and Assistant Principal Chad Weiden of Social Justice High School were accompanying several students when they saw gang members attack two students from Infinity High School. Though Martinez and Weiden were able to break up the fight, the two students were injured and hospitalized.

The students say they witness incidents like these all the time. “We just try to ignore it,” says Manuel,* a freshman at Social Justice, shrugging his shoulders.

A fresh start
Although the gang issue isn’t new, Little Village Lawndale High School Campus is. The school opened in 2005 after a 19-day hunger strike by local parents protesting the unmet promise that a new school would be built. Today it stands out in an otherwise industrial area. Among trash-littered freeways and graffiti-sprayed buildings, the school is a place of hope and safety.

Before classes begin, students take off their coats and hoodies and put them in brick-red lockers lining the halls. Wearing coats in class isn’t allowed in most schools, but in Little Village, hoodies are banned because they’re a sign of gang affiliation. (Wearing gang symbols or colors also is prohibited.)
“As a teacher, it’s really hard because you have to look at kids and go, ‘Are you wearing [gang] colors or is that just your shirt?’ You don’t necessarily know,” says Emily Alt, a young teacher from Michigan who came to Little Village to teach World Civilization and African-American and Latino Literature.

Alt often uses references to gangs to help students comprehend the subjects she’s teaching. Today, the freshmen in her World Civilization class are learning about the Roman Empire. Unlike her sleepy students, Alt is wide-awake and borderline hyper as she compares the power struggle of the Roman Empire to the struggles between gangs for power, territory and money. While some of the kids have difficulty understanding how governments function, they clearly know how gangs work. Understanding empires is only a step more complicated, and the comparison immediately makes sense to most students.
Unlike many CPS schools, Alt and other teachers at Social Justice are open with their students about gang activity. “This school addresses gang issues really clearly, and they don’t pretend it isn’t there,” says Becker, who teaches social studies to juniors and seniors across the hall from Alt’s classroom. Becker credits this openness with making it easier for students to approach the administration with gang problems.

Finding their voices
During Advisory, a shortened class period where students can talk about what’s going on in their lives or do homework, Alt tries to empower her students by encouraging them to open up. “When you have power, or you have a sense of power, you’re a lot less likely to get so down on yourself that you do look at a gang as the only way to pull yourself up,” she tells her students. “What we really want to emphasize here is that regardless of your skin color or race, your gender, your sexual orientation, you all need to take ownership and realize that you have the power to change this.”
For the most part, however, the students keep quiet about gang affiliations or the way gangs affect them. They understand that incriminating themselves could mean expulsion, and exposing friends or family members with gang ties could mean an arrest or separation from people who are important to them.

Also, while teachers have a fairly good idea who is in a gang, they don’t actively look for gang members. The importance of keeping kids in school is often more pressing than finding out who is in a gang.
“We now have zero tolerance in schools,” says Oscar Contreras, an outreach worker for CeaseFire, which provides resources and education to communities to help reduce violence. “It’s easier to kick a problem child out of school than it is to work with him.” But when students are expelled or suspended, they can spend the entire day getting into trouble. “If you throw that kid out of school, where’s he going to go? What’s he going to do?”

Social Justice High School rewards its students for staying away from violence. A poster on the wall in the entrance of Social Justice shows a thermometer with 60 lines and an arrow. If the students go for 60 days without violence, they get a skating party. Right now, the arrow sits at one because of the recent violence.

Alt’s last class of the day is her African-American and Latino Literature class, where she encourages her students to speak more openly about their lives in discussions and writing assignments about race, class, stereotypes and society. The class is about half the size of her other classes, and the chairs are arranged in a circle facing each other. The students are reading Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago. The book is a series of interviews by LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman for a National Public Radio documentary.
Although not all the students like the book, most of them relate to the troubled South Side community and the violence that occurred there more than a decade ago. Alt asked her students to write their own memoirs. Some students included fun events like birthday parties, but others included stories about the hard times they’ve faced in Little Village and Lawndale. In an assignment earlier this year, Alt asked what they considered the biggest problems in their community. “Gangs was one of the things almost all the kids listed across the board,” she says.

Alt says her version of the Freedom Writers curriculum, in which students are urged to write about their community, isn’t that revolutionary. “It’s basically just giving kids a voice,” she says, which is important to keep them out of gangs. When youth feel like an important part of the community, they’re less likely to search for that sense of power through gang affiliation, which would give them power and belonging, but not necessarily safety.

Handling Harrassment
Within the fortress-like walls of Little Village High School, the students have that sense of safety, which they may not feel on the outside. On their way to and from school, gang members harass them, asking “Who you with?” and “Where you from?”
Elena*, a sweet, soft-spoken girl, says members of one gang kept asking her to “throw up the bunny,” a hand symbol for the 26 gang. “I said, ‘I don’t know how to throw up the bunny,’ and they’re trying to teach me and I’m like, ‘I don’t know how to do it.’ They don’t believe you and they don’t go away.”

Some gang members threw bottles at her as she drove home from the store with her older brother. “We had little kids with us, and they saw. We were stopped at a red light and were all scared, so my brother just passed the red light to get out,” Elena says.

That kind of harassment causes some kids to join gangs for the protection they offer. Freshmen are at the prime recruitment age, Alt says, when they’re most insecure and unsure of the world around them. Children as young as 11 and 12 are often pulled in to push drugs, because if they get caught, the consequences will be much less severe than for older teenagers and adults, Contreras says.

Other kids join gangs because their friends are in them, or because of troubled home lives, Contreras says. But even good kids with good families can get pulled in. Becker recalls an especially bright student who joined a gang as a sophomore. “I cried, because I knew where he was going,” Becker says. “I knew I wouldn’t see him senior year. He’d be gone. And he was. He was in jail.” When the student was finally released from jail, he was shot four times by a rival gang member and ended up paralyzed.
That’s the kind of situation Little Village Lawndale High School Campus hopes to prevent by offering better alternatives. Becker notes that even in the bleakest neighborhoods in the city, less than a quarter of the students are involved in gangs. The rest need opportunities to help them stay out of the crossfire.

The students know what those opportunities look like. “Programs, like baseball,” Juan* says hopefully. Corina* says she wants to see a dance program.

“Parents. They gotta be more involved with the student,” adds David.* “When a kid feels left out he’s going to do something he’s not supposed to do because he feels left out. He wants to be a part of something.”
The kids also say they want strong role models, like outreach worker Contreras. And, of course, they want to be heard.
“We really try to love on them a lot and give them a lot of support,” Alt says. “Hopefully kids feel like they have more of a chance when they’re here.”

As the school day ends, a voice interrupts the jazz music on the PA system to announce, “Due to the violence that has been occurring off campus, we feel it might be a dangerous bet to have a dance this Friday. We want to keep everybody safe, and in order to do that, we want to take as many precautions as possible. So again, our homecoming dance has been postponed. It will occur sometime in November around Thanksgiving break. But I do apologize for any inconveniences, and I do encourage all students to do their best and check each other so that this kind of violence does not prevent any other of our extracurricular activities. As long as we continue to have days of peace, our school dance will not be threatened again.”

The students file out of the school. The halls, which had been vibrant with laughter and chattering student voices, are eerily silent.

*Students’ names have been changed to protect their privacy.

This story is written in memory of Miguel Gomez, a 16-year-old sophomore at the School of Social Justice in Little Village High School. Miguel was shot and killed on Nov. 8, 2007 in the crossfire of gang violence. Miguel was the only child of Celso and Marcolina Gomez, who planned to send him to Mexico to live with his grandparents for a few months. Miguel was the eighth Chicago Public School student killed this school year.