Column: Amid the victory cheers, Bass knows she has her work cut out for her.
For those of you who don’t know, Bass is a teacher at P.S. 104, a Montessori school in a predominantly black neighborhood in Chicago. She recently won a job as principal in August, after having been a school security guard for eight years. She’s been talking about this job her whole life and has been preparing for it for the past year, but now she has it and wants to start from square one. That’s never been the Bass way.
The school has struggled for years with gang violence, drugs, and bad behavior, and P.S. 104 is one of many schools across Chicago that have come under attack, both from cops and outside community activists. Bass is being asked to become the face of the school, and has to take the bad with the good.
While she won’t be able to change the culture of the school and the problems it has had in the past, she has to come up with something better.
In an interview with TIME, Bass also talked about the politics of the election (they were, apparently, really bad here in Chicago), the challenges of a teacher at a school with a troubled history, and how teachers have to be “mentors” for their students.
You said that your school has struggled for years with gang violence, drugs, and bad behavior. What do you attribute those problems to?
We have had problems in the past with drugs. We are still dealing with those issues, and we are still looking for more help. We have kids who are on the front lines, dealing with the gang violence on our streets. Their lives are threatened, too. I think some of that goes back to the past when our schools got hit; we did that back a number of years ago. The administration took it and turned it over to the police [to deal with]. The people who did this are not the leaders in our community. We need someone to lead us.
If you have to look at the bad,
