Forrestal Elementary construction viewing has student beaming; ‘This makes it real for them'
Fast forward three months and those same students watched wide-eyed as a construction crane lifted the white beam bearing their names, and those of the rest of the school community, into place on the structure. It is the final steel beam on the new building.
'It's exciting,' McKenzie, a first grader in Laura Rosenkrantz's first-grade class, said.
'School will be really cool because we'll be able to see where we wrote our names,' Barb added.
Forrestal's first graders had a front-row view outside as the crane lifted the final beam into place as the rest of the student body watched a livestream of the event Tuesday in North Chicago marking a major step toward completion of the building.
With the first-grade classrooms positioned on the south end of the existing school building, Principal Cara Kranz said the children there get a firsthand view of the construction workers erecting the building they will enter as third graders in August of 2026.
Kranz said when the students signed the beam in December, they did not really understand the purpose of what they were doing. But, seeing their names on the beam as it was lifted into place made it easier to understand.
'It's an exciting day,' Kranz said. 'They saw where it will be in the building. This makes it real for them. The steel really makes a difference when they see the steelworkers up high putting it in.'
Built in 1957, the current building is in disrepair, but North Chicago School District 187 Superintendent John Price said the test scores there are the best in the district. He anticipates the new building will help them achieve even more.
'The current building is hot in the summer, cold in the winter and you can't drink the water,' Price said. 'The new building will raise (the test scores) again. It will be a 180-degree change. It will have everything new.'
Making the morning special for the students, Kranz said she picked specific music to build their excitement. It started with sounds from the Harry Potter movies, and built to a crescendo with the theme from the movie 'Rocky' when the beam was lifted into the air and then put in place.
A joint effort between District 187 and the U.S. Navy — 25% of Forrestal's students are from military families — Price said $57 million of the $72 million project is coming from the federal Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation and $15 million from the district.
Though there have been no problems so far with the cost-cutting measures being implemented by the federal Department of Government Effeminacy (DOGE), Price has concerns.
'We do have worries,' he said. 'We have been very fortunate so far with the progress of payments.'
Though the entire first-grade class will start the 2026-2027 school year in the new building, Price said a select group of second and third-graders will be there for fourth and fifth grade. There will be some classrooms for them. About 25% will have the choice. First priority will go to military families.
'This will mean less transition for them,' Price said in September. 'They get plenty of transitions when the families change stations.'
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Washington Post
a day ago
- Washington Post
My students resisted reading books. I found an unexpected solution.
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This I had stocked with all sorts of paperbacks from the thrift store and my own collection. The kids would look at the titles for a few seconds, grab one with a thin spine, shuffle back to their desks, open it up and wait for me to leave. Forty-five seconds later, they'd be once again window-staring or doodling or eraser-carving, the book lying sad and forgotten before them. Like every English teacher who has ever walked this planet, I interpreted their resistance to reading not only as a pedagogical challenge but also as a personal affront. More: It was further evidence that civilization was in decline. What better way to learn about honesty and humility than to read 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'? What better way to understand compassion and tolerance than to read 'The House on Mango Street'? What is life without 'The Catcher in the Rye'? There was also the lesser issue of the New Mexico state standards for English language arts, which I was legally obliged to insert into these half-formed human beings. These standards were full of proclamations like, 'By eighth grade, students should be able to identify how an author employs metaphors to express key themes in a work of fiction.' Which those nonreader students would never learn by carving into their erasers. I tried sticks and I tried carrots. I assigned mini book reports and punished the nonreaders with bad grades when they failed to produce. I created whole-class reading challenges, promising pizza parties if as a group we read so many books in a month. Following the advice of more experienced colleagues, I offered graphic novels and magazines to the nonreaders, just to get them started. None of this worked. If anything, my efforts only made the nonreaders resent reading — and me — even more. This problem kept me up at nights. 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He turned out to be a natural, with a slow, plodding delivery. Steinbeck would've been pleased. As we proceeded, some of the reading kids asked if they could take the book home and finish it. I told them they could not. And if I caught them reading ahead in class, I would stop and make them come back to the page we were on. With that one student reading Lennie and me reading the descriptions at a leisurely clip, it took us a few months of Fridays to move through that slim novel. I taught English for another decade after that class. Each year, I was asked to spend less time on literature, more time training students to hunt down main ideas in snippets of informational text. Each year, I failed to comply, and kept reading novels out loud. I don't know what the next generation of English teachers has done. I don't know if middle and high school students still circle up and listen to literature anymore. What I do know is that I will never forget how the classroom was dark and still and quiet as we came to those final tragic pages of that Steinbeck classic. There seemed to be very little happening in the world outside the windows. 'Le's do it now. Le's get that place now,' our Lennie read, slowly. Carefully. And I read on from there, and the classroom grew even quieter, the circle seeming to shrink, the distance between us dissipating, falling away. And then the final words, and we closed our books and sat there, 20 human beings in a circle, the unbearable weight of humanity draped over us like an enormous wool blanket, into which it was all woven in, rage and injustice, compassion and love. Seth Biderman is a writer who lives in Washington, D.C. This is adapted and edited from an essay in his Substack, Unprincipalled, which draws from his former life as a teacher and principal.
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New projects, hires and programs mark the start of the 2025-26 school year in Iowa City
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