When Chicago closed her kids’ school, she decided to fight back

Irene Robinson is making a giant quilt to memorialize schools that have closed across the country. Robinson says closing schools is a hate crime because it mostly hurts black and Latino children and their communities.

Robinson became an activist against school closings after Overton Elementary, the South Side school her children and grandchildren attended, was shuttered in 2013. Overton was one of 49 elementary schools that were shut down year, the largest mass school closing in the country.

After the shutdowns, schools like Parkman Elementary, less than a mile from Overton, were emptied out. The district hauled supplies and furniture from the closed buildings to other schools or put them in storage. Some items were sold for scrap, donated or put in the dump.

Irene Robinson was one of several people who went on a hunger strike for more than a month in 2015 to demand the reopening of Dyett High School on Chicago’s South Side. The school did reopen, but not with the curriculum that hunger strikers wanted.

Irene Robinson holds a photo of June, the third of her four daughters, who moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with her four kids after Overton Elementary closed and she had difficulty paying rent in Chicago.

Irene Robinson recently spent time with her family at a birthday party for one of her granddaughters at their home in South Chicago. Irene’s grandkids know all about her work fighting for public education.

Irene Robinson has had experiences that will sound familiar to many African-Americans in Chicago. Five years ago, when the city shuttered an unprecedented 50 schools, many of Irene’s grandchildren lost their schools and had to transfer to new ones. The school across the street from her house, Overton Elementary, closed too. It hit Irene especially hard because it was the place her own kids had gone to school.

Then, rents went up in her neighborhood and Irene couldn’t afford to stay. So she moved to a more affordable apartment in a different neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. It pained her to leave Bronzeville, where her great-grandmother had settled during the Great Migration as millions of African-Americans left the South for greater opportunities. Irene has seen family members leave Chicago for the suburbs and Iowa in search of a better life, too.

But Irene isn’t taking all this change lying down. She’s decided to fight the city policies that she sees as disruptive to African-American children, families and their communities. So she started speaking up — and loudly.

The Chicago Reporter teamed up with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting to tell the story of how the mass school closures affected Irene and her family, and why she’s made it her life’s mission to prevent more shutdowns from happening. This story is the latest installment in the Reporter’s “Empty schools, empty promises” series.

Listen to the story:

Download the episode, “My Town, Chi-Town,” on iTunes. 

This story was reported by The Chicago Reporter’s Kalyn Belsha and produced by Bill Healy for Reveal.