Empty desks are a sign of the season

Product: CTMETRO
PubDate: 12-20-2007 Zone: C Edition: HD
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T H U R S D AY
DECEMBER 20, 2007
CHICAGO
Eric Zorn
Catching up
with early
departures
N
o single local story of 2007 excited as much attention, as much
sanctimony and as much armchair sociology as the Amy Jacobson
story.
To refresh: Jacobson, a veteran reporter for NBC-Ch. 5, accepted a lastminute invitation July 6 to a back-yard
gathering at the Plainfield home of
Craig Stebic, whose wife, Lisa, had
vanished April 30.
Jacobson said she was on her way to
take her kids swimming in Chicago
when she got the invitation. Sensing
an opportunity to get better access to
the reclusive man at the center of the
mystery, she drove them to Plainfield
instead.
When a crew from CBS-Ch. 2 videotaped her in a bikini top “partying”
near Stebic’s back-yard pool, Jacobson
lost her job and became the focus of an
intense debate about journalism ethics, sexism and even parenting.
“It still seems surreal,” she said
Wednesday when I called to update her
story.
Those who predicted that a competing Chicago station or a cable-news
network would hire Jacobson if for no
other reason than publicity were
wrong: She said she’s interviewed only
with local TV news outlets in Los Angeles, St. Louis, Phoenix and Tampa.
She said reports hinting she was
pursuing an entertainment career
were “misleading.” She said that when
she taped a Fox News Channel pilot in
October with Erich “Mancow” Muller
she was not serving as a co-star, but
“just helping out a friend by being the
member of a panel. I eventually will
come back to TV news reporting.”
The silver lining of this career crisis? “I get to be with my children [ages
2½ and 4] a lot at a great time during
their lives,” she said.
The older child is vaguely aware of
what happened, Jacobson said. She
said that, at a restaurant, when a waitress asked, “What do you want?” the
boy answered, “I want my mommy’s
job back. She got fired for taking us
swimming.”
She said she has not spoken to Craig
Stebic since her visit to his house became national news and that she still
lives on the North Side.
Jacobson said she briefly took a
part-time job with a not-for-profit agency that assists low-income families
with tax problems, but now she volunteers at that agency and at a homeless
shelter.
Regrets? “Sure, I’d do things differently” given the benefit of hindsight,
she said. “But I don’t want to go there.
I’ve got to move forward.”
A local story that got considerably
less attention this year was the quixotic bid for the presidency by Chicago
businessman John Cox.
Cox began campaigning in Iowa and
New Hampshire in early 2006, visiting
both states dozens of times and spending at least $1 million of his own money trying to become a contender in the
crowded Republican primary field.
When I interviewed him for a column in August shortly after he finished 11th out of 11 candidates in an
Iowa straw poll, Cox vowed to “stick it
out” through the early caucuses and
primaries.
But when I called him for an update
Wednesday he said he’d closed his
campaign offices late last month after
having been excluded from yet another
Republican debate.
“What’s the point anymore?” he
asked. “I always knew it was a long
shot. But when the media made their
decision not to include me, I figured it
was a total lost cause.”
After I wrote a column in October
about how a portion of folk singer
Steve Goodman’s ashes were scattered
on the warning track at Wrigley Field,
I heard from a number of readers who
admitted to having surreptitiously
leaned over the outfield wall to scatter
cremated remains at the Friendly
Confines.
Several got in touch with me again
when they read of the massive postseason excavation and rehab of the
playing surface at Wrigley: What had
become of their loved ones?
Not to worry, said team spokesman
Jason Carr. They continue to rest in
pieces.
The warning track—where most
ashes, including Goodman’s, end up—
was extended but otherwise undisturbed during the landscaping project.
Read the original columns and leave
comments at chicagotribune.com/zorn
Duncan: 50 grade
schools could close
Chief defends plan
as CPS’ best course
By Carlos Sadovi
Tribune staff reporter
Chicago Public Schools
Chief Arne Duncan indicated
on Wednesday that about 50
underutilized
elementary
schools could be closed within
the next five years under a
plan designed to address declining enrollment.
Duncan defended the proposal as the best option for students, who he said would lose
educational and extracurricular options if their schools’ enrollments became too small.
The closings would be the
most dramatic moves in a review of 147 of the district’s
most underutilized schools,
all of them with fewer than
half the students they are designed to handle.
Under the plan, district officials would go before the
school board every year for
the next three to five years,
with recommendations that
could potentially mean closing or consolidating 10 to 15
schools each year. The program must be approved by the
board each year.
“While generally I’m a fan
of small schools, you have to
have some critical mass to run
a viable school. When you get
down to 150 or 175 students,
you don’t have enough students in each grade to run a
full menu of activities,’’ Duncan said. “Educationally [con-
solidation is] the right move.”
The Tribune on Wednesday
reported that 122 schools are
at 30 to 50 percent of their enrollment capacity. An additional 25 are below 30 percent
capacity, and are at the greatest risk of closing.
The majority of the underused schools are in areas that
have
experienced
demographic changes on the Near
West and South Sides, with
smaller pockets in lakefront
PLEASE SEE SCHOOLS, PAGE 6
Birds of a feather on
the North Side have
lost one of their own
Tribune file photo by Bob Fila
Pigeon-bedecked Joseph
Zeman was a familiar figure
for years in Lincoln Square.
Pigeon
man’s
story
at end
A newspaper clipping
helps police identify a
man killed in an accident,
drawing Tribune reporter
Barbara Mahany back into
the world of the ‘Pigeon
Man of Lincoln Square’
Tribune photo by Antonio Perez
Fourth-graders at Columbia Explorers Academy on the Southwest Side do schoolwork Tuesday in the midst of several
empty desks. Some of their classmates already had left to spend an extended Christmas vacation visiting relatives.
Empty desks
are a sign of
the season
Hispanic students pay a steep price for
taking monthlong Christmas vacations
to their homelands, school officials say
By Alexa Aguilar
Tribune staff reporter
Martha
Padilla-Ramos
and Jose Barrera fondly remember the long car rides
south to Mexico each December when they were children. At the end of the trek
awaited their cousins, delicious food, trips to church
and days of parties to celebrate Christmas.
It was a beloved part of
their childhood, so the Chicago-area school administrators understand why families make the annual trek to
their homelands. But they
can’t understand why so
many families—an estimated 10 percent of the Hispanic students in Waukegan, for example—plan
these trips to last a month or
more, far beyond the tradi-
Tribune photo by Nuccio DiNuzzo
Juan Carlos Camarillo (from left), 5, as Joseph; Valeria
Gomez, 6, as Mary; and Angel Camarillo, 4, as an angel,
are ready for a procession in St. Nicholas Parish in Aurora.
tional two-week holiday
break Illinois schools allow.
Although
most
local
schools are holding classes
through Friday, many of
these families already have
been gone a week or more. In
addition to falling behind in
their schoolwork, educators
said, the students are in danger of being labeled truant
and could perform poorly on
standardized tests that help
determine if their schools
meet federal No Child Left
Behind guidelines. Other
students can expect extra
class time with teachers to
catch up.
Some districts threaten to
fail students who miss too
many days or force them to
re-enroll, repaying registration fees and possibly losing
PLEASE SEE VACATION, PAGE 6
Police didn’t know who he
was, the old man killed Tuesday by a van near Devon Avenue and McCormick Road.
They found newspaper clippings—about a half-dozen
laminated copies of the same
story—tucked into one of his
many Jewel bags.
Cut, copied, pressed between plastic, the clipping
showed the man in full color,
feathered with pigeons, and
told a piece of his story. And
except for that clipping, the
cops and the doctors who pronounced him dead at the hospital had no clue who he was.
The pigeon man’s life was
like that. Barely a soul had a
clue who he was.
That’s why the cops called
me, just an hour or two after
he died. They knew I knew a
bit of his story. I wrote the one
they found in his possession.
Two years and three months
had passed, and he still carried it wherever he went.
After the old man died an
hour later, the cops needed
someone to call, needed to
know if there was a soul in the
world who might care to know
what happened to Joe Zeman,
who most everybody called
“the pigeon man of Lincoln
Square.”
Here’s just a bit of the pigeon man’s story, the one he
carried:
“Except for the lips, you
would think he was made out
of stone, the man who sits,
hours on end, on the red fire
hydrant on Western Avenue,
just north of Lawrence, pigeons by the dozens perched
on him.
“Pigeons on his head. PiPLEASE SEE PIGEON, PAGE 5
Beds, help lacking
for homeless youth
By Karoun Demirjian
Tribune staff reporter
Hector Castro was 13 years
old when his parents kicked
him out of the house.
Castro, now 20, made his
way to downtown Chicago to
find a way to live on his own.
What he found were limited
options: He could prostitute
himself for money and shelter
or simply sleep on the streets.
Though he tried repeatedly
to get into shelters, Castro
said, he was routinely met
with closed doors.
“It would take three or four
months each time before I
could find a bed,” Castro said.
“I didn’t have money for the
phone, so I had to go from
place to place, but it was always the same . . . waiting
lists.”
It’s a common problem, according to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, which
released a study Thursday
that said more than half of the
state’s homeless youths, those
who are 14 to 24 years old and
unaccompanied, are turned
away from shelters because of
a lack of space.
The report states that there
PLEASE SEE HOMELESS, PAGE 9
Tribune photo by Abel Uribe
Hector Castro, 20, stops by the Night Ministry’s van on a recent Friday night. Castro, who was
homeless from age 13, said he was often turned away from shelters due to lack of space.
Product: CTMETRO
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Time: 12-19-2007
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CHICAGO TRIBUNE Ô
METRO
Ô SECTION 2 Ô THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2007
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Michael Arians, a former Oregon, Ill., mayor who has been trying to solve the 1948 murder of
17-year-old Mary Jane Reed, has a sketch of the victim in his restaurant.
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Mismatched bones add
to mystery of ’48 slaying
Experts examine
remains from victim
By Ted Gregory
Tribune staff reporter
A curious, 59-year-old murder
mystery in Oregon, Ill., took its
latest twist Wednesday when a
forensic anthropologist who examined the remains from the
victim’s casket said the skull
and vertebrae are from different bodies.
The man who has been trying
to solve the 1948 murder of Mary
Jane Reed for nearly a decade
said that conclusion is more evidence that the initial investigation was, at the very least, inept
and probably corrupt.
“There has been a cover-up in
this town for 60 years,” said Michael Arians, a local restaurateur and former Oregon mayor.
Arians said he has spent more
than $50,000 to hire University
of Illinois forensic anthropologist Linda Klepinger to clear up
HOMELESS:
Many more
resorting to
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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
are only enough beds to serve
about 10 percent of the state’s
homeless youths, who number
more than 4,100 according to a
2005 study by University of Illinois at Chicago researchers.
For those who need services besides housing, the success rate
is not much better: Only 12 percent of homeless youths are able
to get these services, the coalition found.
The directors of the study say
the gaps in service often mean
the difference between rehabilitating young people and letting
them fall through the cracks.
Finding a place to stay has a
dramatic effect on a homeless
young person. Of homeless
youths who emerge from transitional living programs in shelters, 87 percent move in to safe,
stable permanent housing, the
study found.
“Youths that have been
turned away numerous times
end up sleeping in cars or on
friends’ floors or on the street.
Meanwhile, they’re trying to get
to school and trying to get to
work, but struggling and losing
hope because of their homelessness,” said Daria Mueller, a policy specialist for the coalition.
“If they can just get into a program, they have a chance to realize their potential.”
Getting into a program is
proving an increasingly difficult task. Across Chicago,
which has about 36 percent of
the state’s capacity for youth
shelters, shelter managers say
they are forced to turn away
the mystery that has gnawed at
him since 1999.
Arians maintains that a nowdeceased local law-enforcement
officer killed Reed, 17, after a
stormy relationship. “Everybody’s scared to death to say
anything. We need someone
from outside the area, someone
with some forensic expertise to
jump in and get involved and
ask some questions and get
some answers.”
Ogle County Sheriff Greg Beitel, whose office coordinated
Mary Jane Reed’s exhumation
in August 2005 and led the ensuing investigation, said his office
has nothing to hide. Investigators who re-examined the case
announced in February 2006
that two now-deceased brothers
likely were the killers of Reed
and her date, Stanley Skridla,
28.
The couple were attacked
while they were parked on a
Lovers Lane on the outskirts of
Oregon, a town of about 4,000
people on the Rock River 100
miles west of Chicago. The inyoung people in need nightly for
lack of space.
The Open Door Shelter in
West Town, which is run by the
Night Ministry, has 16 beds
available for homeless youths
ages 14 to 20. Director Carole
Mills said the number of young
people turned away has been increasing steadily, from 514 in
2004, to 605 in 2005, to 788 in 2006.
“We’re averaging almost two
youths a day who we can’t serve
because there’s no bed open for
them,” Mills said. “It’s one of
the most difficult parts of the
job, knowing that kids needed a
bed and we couldn’t provide
them that.”
A lack of money is a major
reason why the shelters aren’t
able to expand to meet growing
demands.
Most shelters rely on a combination of government dollars
and private donations to keep
their doors open, but in the last
decade, annual state funding—$4 million in 1998, $4.7 million in 2007—has not kept pace
with inflation, Mueller said.
But simply increasing funding for beds across the state is
not a quick fix for youth homelessness, the coalition study’s
directors said, pointing to to
other findings that suggest
long-term stability may not be
dependent on access to permanent housing alone. Although 87
percent of young people emerging from transitional shelters
find stable housing, only 36 percent get jobs.
Getting jobs for young homeless people is “a need that we are
trying to fill and a No. 1 priority,” said David Myers, executive director of Teen Living Programs of Chicago, which provides 36 beds and other programs for youth. “Without jobs,
you cannot remain independent.”
The problem may be more
acute outside city limits, according to the study. Services
are concentrated where homeless youths come to live, down-
vestigators suggested the killings may have resulted from a
botched robbery attempt.
But Arians, who, with Reed’s
last surviving sibling pushed
for the exhumation and investigation, said the sheriff’s conclusion conflicts with evidence
that suggests the killings were
“a crime of passion.” Those indicators include Skridla being
shot four times in the groin and
the charring of his head, Arians
said.
Klepinger, who has been
working in forensic pathology
since about 1978 and wrote the
book “Fundamentals of Forensic Anthropology” in 2006, said
she and John Moore, a professor
of anatomy and forensics at
Parkland College in Champaign, examined the skull and
vertebrae last week. Both came
to the same conclusion, Klepinger said.
“It’s wacko, really weird,”
Klepinger said Wednesday. “I’ve
never come across anything
like this before.”
[email protected]
town Chicago, but most youths
are leaving homes outside Chicago. That means displaced
youths, having few resources,
may have to travel great distances to get help, Mueller said.
The longer it takes to get off
the street, the greater the consequences can be.
According to a recent study
based on an analysis of call-center data by the Chicago-based
National Runaway Switchboard, unaccompanied homeless youth are reporting being
away from home for longer periods of time and engaging in
more dangerous practices, such
as sex and drugs, in order to survive.
“I often talk about it as a silent
crisis in our society,” said Maureen Blaha, director of the National Runaway Switchboard,
which reports that since 2001,
the increase in calls by young
people who say they have sold
drugs has gone up by 150 percent. Those who say they have
engaged in prostitution has
gone up by 60 percent.
But there is still hope to reach
even those who seem to have
been failed by an insufficient
system, social workers say.
For Castro, whose parents
kicked him out after he revealed
his homosexuality at age 13, it
took seven years of intermittent
attempts to finally get off the
street. In those seven years, he
said, he had resorted to prostitution, sometimes for money
and sometimes for a place to
sleep. In that time, he contracted HIV, he said.
Two weeks ago, he enrolled in
a permanent housing program
at Chicago House, an organization that provides services to
young people infected with HIV
and AIDS; he has enrolled in
G.E.D. classes and, for the first
time, is thinking about college.
“I spent so long going from
place to place, and being told
no,” he said. “It’s so nice to have
a place to go home.”
[email protected]
Police probe Glendale Heights slaying
Glendale Heights police are
investigating the homicide of a
local man found fatally shot
early Wednesday.
Police found the body of Corey Dale Krueger, 35, of Glendale Heights while responding
to a complaint about a dog barking in the 1200 block of Pleasant
Avenue about 3 a.m., police said.
Krueger was lying on the
sidewalk and appeared to have
suffered a gunshot wound to his
head, police said.
Krueger was taken to Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital
in Downers Grove, where he
was pronounced dead at 10:45
a.m. The DuPage County Major
Crimes Task Force is helping
with the investigation.
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