Some argued that it was only fair for kids who live across the street to be able to attend the school, while others said if parents were interested in neighborhood schools, they should check out Burr School, a few blocks away. A couple of parents were concerned that the space crunch would force three- and four-year-old students to nap in the basement, prompting a father to respond that when his daughter was asleep, her eyes were closed and it didn’t matter where she was.
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“It was brought to my attention that this has become controversial,” he said. “It’s finally come to a point where people want to come to our neighborhood schools. Now we had a situation where parents came to me, not just that group that came in and saw me, but individual parents who called me and came in on their own, saying, ‘We can’t get in to this school—it’s a good school, and we want to be there.’ I saw that the only solution to that was to add capacity.”
“That’s fine,” Matlak said. “Just so you guys don’t think I unilaterally decided this and I can unilaterally undecide it. This was a big lobbying effort and we were successful. If you want to tell Arne Duncan we don’t want the resources, I’m sure he’ll put them someplace else.”
On Thursday, Matlak addressed the controversy with considerably less bluster than he’d shown the night before. In a vaguely worded statement, he said that he was working with CPS administrators and the school’s faculty and parents to “make the best decisions possible for the short- and long-term future of Drummond.” He added: “The [CPS] Office of Academic Enhancement revealed today that the percentage of neighborhood children who attend Drummond is much higher than previously thought.”
