Shepherds for a Flock in the Cross-Fire

Three times a day, gathering on a housing project commons where even police move with caution, men wearing orange armbands have stood their ground this week to watch out for the children.

They have been there on unbearable mornings when “the hawk”--Chicago’s infamous lakefront winter wind--roared past the eroding brick towers like an invisible subway. And they have returned twice each afternoon, when the cold burns off just enough for the neighborhood’s gun-toting teenagers to settle old scores.

Nearly a hundred strong in good weather and half that during a stinging snowstorm, the shivering army of volunteer escorts fanned out around the dirt-bare commons of the Robert Taylor Homes--the city’s most violence-racked project--shepherding 605 children to and from Terrell Elementary school amid a spiraling gang war.

The outpouring of volunteers is an extraordinary mobilization of inner-city resolve. But their presence also is symbolic of how impotent urban school officials and police have become in assuring residents that their children can venture even a few blocks safely. On the South Side and in other gang-patrolled neighborhoods here, it is no longer enough for schools to secure their own halls--they have to create safe corridors outside as well.

High-Rise Gunfire Makes Children Cower

Several times each year, gunfire between rival gangs rises to a crescendo among the towering high-rises of the Taylor homes complex, forcing hundreds of elementary students to cower in their homes for days. Elementary and high schools all along the mile-long Taylor corridor empty out, losing as many as 40% of their student populations in waves of fear-induced absenteeism that education officials say is a factor in the chronic truancy that has long plagued Chicago’s schools.

“I can see why these poor kids wouldn’t want to budge outside,” said Oswald Lewis, a retired fire battalion chief who walked through the project with a throng of giggling children.

While the students scampered ahead, Lewis looked up nervously toward “the hole”: three high-rise towers where bullets whined for days early in the month. On this afternoon, not a gun barrel was in sight.

For the moment, men like Lewis have made a difference. Joined by preachers, school officials, retirees and, at times, even gang members, the escorts have liberated the sidewalks around the Taylor homes. They have climbed up the project’s dark stairwells to make sure their young charges get to school and return home safely.

“This has gone on too long,” said the Rev. B. Herbert Martin, pastor at Progressive Community Church, a South Side congregation. “We can’t sit by anymore and watch our children hide in their homes, too afraid to go to their schools.”

Martin and a group of ministers were instrumental in summoning scores of male parishioners to rise early and leave their jobs and businesses for several hours to stand sentry near the Taylor homes.

“When I saw all these men standing up for the community, it made me feel I needed to be here,” said John Wesley, a Taylor resident who joined the escort patrol.

Plan to Create Safety Zones

The community call to arms jibes neatly with ambitious plans by the Chicago school district to create safety zones for schoolchildren in some of the most shunned neighborhoods in the city. At Terrell Elementary and seven other schools near the Taylor homes, the school district will begin training and paying neighbors to act both as long-term escorts and as truant officers. A similar program started last October at another elementary school near the Cabrini-Green housing project just north of Chicago’s downtown.

“You’ve got to have daily visibility. Otherwise, the gang activity comes right back,” said Blondean Davis, who heads the district’s office of schools and regions. “You can run or you can stand and fight. We chose to stand.”

The district had at one point considered running: closing down Jenner Elementary, near Cabrini-Green, and transferring its students to another school building farther away. But “we just can’t abandon a school because of the gangs,” Davis said.

There was no similar option at Terrell because there are no vacant school properties nearby where students could be sent. Until this week, Terrell’s administrators were helpless when gang warfare broke out--resorting to calling Taylor families by phone when attendance plunged and pleading with parents to bring their sons and daughters back.

“We knew why they were staying out,” said Terrell’s principal, Ceola Barnes. “But we didn’t have any way of assuring them that it would be all right.”

When bullets began arcing over the commons outside “the hole” in the early morning of Jan. 5, Kimberly Snyder made the easy decision she made several times last year. Her children--Tansheika, 6, Clifton, 5, and Myesha, 4--would take a gunfire-imposed holiday. “People who live in Taylor are not fools,” Snyder said. “I kept them home a week straight until we had people to fetch ‘em back and forth.”

Although homicides and other indicators of violent crime have dropped in Chicago over the last several years, killings in the Taylor homes region rose from two in 1996 to six in 1997. Police and residents say that since Thanksgiving, gang strife has worsened between the South Side-based Gangster Disciples and the rival Mickey Cobras and Vice Lords as demolition crews began boarding up and preparing to demolish Taylor homes towers.

As many as half of the 28 towers may be felled as part of an ambitious decentralization plan forwarded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which took control of the Chicago Housing Authority three years ago. Already, one building has been torn down and the entire dangerous “hole” complex is slated to be gone by the end of this year.

“Every time they board up a place, people got to move. When they move, there’s trouble,” said Patrick Newbern, 35, a Taylor resident who said he was a member of the Vice Lords gang.

According to police and Taylor residents, gunfire erupted around “the hole” nearly two weeks ago after a lovers’ quarrel resulted in a shooting that drew in the area’s major gang factions. The gunfire grew so intense at moments, Snyder said, “that we had to crawl to get around the apartment.”

Snyder was standing upright when she opened her third-floor apartment door this week and saw Eduardo Negron, a Chicago school administrator, surrounded by a pack of giddy children. Negron ushered Snyder’s three children and four cousins into the apartment, warmed on this winter day only by the blue flames of an oven burner.

“This man is a hero,” Snyder said, motioning toward Negron. Tansheika, who had skipped across the icy commons, agreed. “I feel better when there’s no guns,” she said.

70 Paid Escorts to Walk Children

Starting next week, Terrell and the other schools near the Taylor homes will be able to dispatch 10-member teams of paid escorts to walk with students. That will provide the Taylor homes with a steady force of 70 escorts, paid $8 an hour to walk with children two hours each in the morning and afternoon.

Although school officials expect that the volunteer escort army will likely dwindle as time passes, Pastor Martin vows that “the men of this community will not abandon these children.”

A handful of Martin’s parishioners had worked for years as school escorts. But the fusillades at the Taylor homes earlier this month provided the perfect opportunity, Martin said, “for the men of this community to show their leadership.”

The escorts run the gamut of South Side Chicago society--from influential ministers like Martin and connected politicians like state Rep. Howard Kenner to concerned retirees like Lewis. And moving quietly among them, wearing the same “Parent Patrol” armband, Taylor residents said, are gang members from both warring factions.

“Hey, we’re family men too. I got six kids,” Newbern said. The Vice Lords member said he had not joined the escorts, but some of his running buddies have.

Martin, who also has played a role in trying to forge peace between the Gangster Disciples and Mickey Cobras, said gang members were welcomed as escorts. The minister even suggested that school officials consider hiring gang leaders as paid escorts.

“You’ve got to give these young men doing the violence something else to do, teach them about working a real job,” he said.

The volunteer spirit wafts only so far. Ecstatic about the community’s spirit of volunteerism, school officials said they accepted all comers when escorts flocked to Terrell’s doors Monday. But before escorts go on the city payroll, they will face background checks. Gang membership, they said, is an automatic disqualifier.

“You can’t be shooting up the place one minute and protecting schoolchildren the next,” Davis said. “We’d love to have this many men out there all the time. But first we have to trust them.”