It’s a Rude Awakening to Most but Chicago School Cuts Tardiness With Principal’s Wake-up Calls

For some families with students at Chicago’s Morgan Park High School, the morning “alarm clock” is a 6 a.m. phone call from the principal.

“Good morning. This is Dr. Walter Pilditch, principal of Morgan Park High School, with a recorded wake-up call. Your child has been continually late in coming to school. I will continue to make this call until the problem is solved. Thank you for your cooperation.”

The robot-dialed reveille calls have been going out since last September and are credited with cutting tardiness at the 2,250-student school by more than 50%, to about 40 daily.

“I’m just trying to get them out of bed in the morning . . . like an Army drill sergeant,” said Pilditch. “We can’t teach kids who aren’t in school, and we want them here on time.”

Pilditch is one of a handful of school officials across the country--and the only one in metropolitan Chicago--using an automatic calling machine to roust lazy students out of bed. The $9,000 machine was installed with a grant from the Ford Foundation.

Such machines were introduced in urban schools several years ago to call the parents of absent students in the evening and notify them that their children had missed school. They are still used that way at 26 schools in Chicago, including Morgan Park.

Putting them to work in the morning to wake families of repeatedly tardy students was first tried in 1982 at William Howard Taft High School in New York City when Principal Lorraine Monroe sang a cheerful “Good morning, good morning . . . . “ in Spanish and English to 200 to 300 students daily.

At Morgan Park, where classes begin at 8 a.m., F. Lee Slick, a physics teacher, helped create the wake-up program and now monitors the robot-dialing device.

“We had one kid who complained that he wasn’t getting the calls so he wasn’t getting to school on time,” Slick said. “I told him this wasn’t a hotel.”

“If you don’t want to get up to go to school they shouldn’t make you,” complained Dwayne Harbour, 15, a freshman who has been awakened by the automated calls several times this school year. “My parents think it’s OK. They like it.”

“The students think it is stupid. They don’t want a computer calling them in the morning,” complained senior Tina Dalrimple, 17, who has yet to be called by the school’s wake-up machine.

To thwart the automated wake-up calls, some students have reported phone number changes to the school, leading the machine to dial various businesses and corporate offices. Others have told school officials they have no phones.

“The kids are scared to death of these machines,” said Slick. “Just do it once and that usually ends the tardiness.”

“I would imagine I get sworn at every morning,” said Pilditch of his robot wake-up service. “But,” he added, “I’m not there to hear it.”