Will we want to hear what former Bear Clark thinks about his kid’s schooling?

The way we want to think of Desmond

I find the circumstances of former Chicago Bears tight end Desmond Clark to be intriguing.

Clark went to his son’s high school in suburban Vernon Hills to confront officials about what he thinks is unjust treatment, and HE winds up facing criminal charges. School officials say they felt intimidated by Clark’s demeanor.

ACTUALLY BY BOTH Clark and his wife, Maria. He is charged with disorderly conduct, while she is charged with assault. Both are free on $2,500 bond.

The two got arrested for an incident on Aug. 29 at the high school that was supposed to be a discussion about the fact that their son says he’s being harassed on racial grounds.

They wanted to see what, if anything, the school was prepared to do about it. The fact that the high school appeared to be interested in doing nothing about it angered the Clarks – which is totally understandable.

Even though the high school wants to believe they’re the victim in this saga – and I’m sure there are enough people out there who get all squeamish whenever racial issues come up that they’ll be willing to believe that the former ballplayer ought to just shut up about it!

THIS MAY BE the one “cardinal sin” a former professional athlete can commit. Many bad things would be forgiven because of the fact that Clark was once athletic enough to wear the uniform of the Chicago Bears.

But bring up racial issues? That’s very bad, in some eyes.

Most of the news accounts I have read about this incident have been rather vague. Which is why I find it ridiculous that the high school district felt compelled on Monday to say it thinks the incident has been taken out of context.

I’d argue the reports have not put the problem in any true context. We really don’t know what happened, or what the behavior is that the son has had to endure that had the parents so upset.

EXCEPT FOR A WBBM-TV news report where Clark opened up to a little more detail, saying his son has been harassed on racial grounds ever since he started at the school in 2012. Such as being called assorted racial slurs and being told his parents hang from trees in the front yard.

Usually, they'd be proud to have former Bear amongst parents

Totally believable in light of the fact that there are people with their own racial hang-ups, and at that age they’re stupid enough to think their nonsense actually means something.

But the current outburst is related to the fact that Clark’s son was being disciplined by the school for being seen intoxicated while at a rally celebrating the Chicago Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup victory earlier this year.

Because of that, school officials said he was prohibited from participating in a lip-synch contest being held at the high school. When the son tried challenging that decision, a school administrator is alleged to have said, “If he wants to act like a criminal, he can get out.”

A COMMENT THAT infuriated Clark to the point where he and his wife went to meet with school officials, and tempers were lost to the point where the school called the police – and Clark is now banned from the high school campus.

A move that strikes me as being motivated more by trying to make Clark look bad when the criminal case eventually goes to trial – or winds up getting settled with some sort of plea deal.

Admittedly, Clark’s account makes it seem like an open-and-shut acquittal for him, particularly since the school is refusing to say much of anything – usually a sign of someone covering up. But I don’t doubt that there are those who wish Clark would just pipe down so we can go back to just thinking of him in terms of those former Sunday afternoons when he took to the gridiron at Soldier Field.

Although if we want to be honest, those people who can’t view ballplayers as human beings and don’t want to address such racial outbursts most often are the real problem our society faces.

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Some don’t see beyond Roosevelt Road; they miss Chicago character

I wish I could say I was shocked and appalled to learn that the Gwendolyn Brooks College Prep high school baseball program got a victory by forfeit Saturday night because their competition – Walter Payton College Prep – refused to make the trip to the Roseland neighborhood to play the game.

A world of difference beyond geography

Payton Prep is a relatively new school in the Near North area near downtown Chicago. It is an upscale part of the city; albeit not that far from what once was the Cabrini-Green public housing complex.

IT IS THE mirror image of Roseland – an old neighborhood on the city’s Far South Side (around 111^th Street and Indiana Avenue) – in so many ways.

So to read the accounts published in the Chicago Sun-Times that some parents of children on the baseball team refused to let their kids make the trip sounds way too predictable – non-black parents automatically thinking that the overwhelmingly-black neighborhood is dangerous because it isn’t just like their community.

It is a bad stereotype in so many ways -- even though Payton Principal Tim Devine told the Chicago Tribune that "leadership issues" within the baseball program (and not racial attitudes) were to blame for the forfeiture.

In fact, the racial issue is an attitude that is the real problem behind the crime problems – people who are more than willing to ignore certain parts of Chicago and try to pretend as though they don’t exist. As though some city residents aren’t worth as much as others.

THERE ARE THOSE people who make a point of moving to the city upon completing their education and thinking of themselves as particularly urbane – even though they usually live in a version of Chicago that stretches about as far west as Western Avenue and as far south as Roosevelt Road.

And in their ideal take on Chicago, Lake Michigan would be within constant eyesight. Because life gets too uncomfortable for them away from the north lakefront.

Yes, I’ll concede the lakefront has its perks. It offers some of the benefits that make city life worthwhile. There is something special about those neighborhoods.

And I’ll also concede that the Roseland neighborhood isn’t exactly a place where I would want to hang out on a regular basis. Mostly because the neighborhood is old and has been allowed to decay to the point where it is not one of the city’s nicer communities.

BUT EVEN THAT decay is due to the fact that former residents (a lot of those white ethnic types who fled decades ago and never think of visiting the old turf) want to believe that it is no longer worth preserving because the people who remain aren’t exactly like them in every respect.

So for those who want to blame the current residents for letting the neighborhood rot away, keep in mind that there are others who would interfere with any effort to bolster the neighborhood.

They’d rather see the resources put into the places they’re currently residing in.

It’s not a simple matter of placing the “bigot” label on certain individuals for wanting to pretend that places like Roseland do not exist.

THEN AGAIN, IT’S very easy to say that the people who want to argue that bigotry has nothing to do with this situation are really just individuals who don’t want to be called on their trash-talk.

This willingness to separate ourselves even within the Chicago city limits is the problem that threatens all of us. We need to start thinking of ourselves as one city; even if we are so many varied communities of differing people within the overall municipal boundaries.

Saturday’s high school baseball forfeit is a bit of evidence that some people are determined to keep us apart.

To the point where I suspect that if Cabrini-Green were still in existence just a few blocks from Payton Prep, those parents probably would refuse to let their children attend school there!

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Restroom break ban for high schoolers?

It has been some three decades since I navigated the halls of a high school on a regular basis, yet I couldn’t help but chuckle when I read the reports in the Tinley Park-based Southtown Star newspaper that are making southwest suburban Evergreen Park High School a place worthy of national news attention.

For officials there are implementing a new policy that they say will increase the amount of time that students spend in the classroom. They’re putting restrictions on restroom breaks.

UNDER THE NEW policy, teachers are to keep track of how many times their students ask for permission to go to the restroom during class. Any student who takes more than three breaks per semester from any one class will be required to stay after school to make up the time they used to release potentially-deadly toxins from their bodies.

It’s not quite detention for using the potty. But it has the same feel.

Now I will be the first to admit that I fully believe some students are abusing the idea of restroom breaks – using them as an excuse to leave classes they find particularly dull (or teachers whom they find to be particularly obnoxious in personality).

I’m sure there are some students who would spend as much of their time as possible in the restroom – when they couldn’t be in the cafeteria (particularly since schools these days seem to be watching those lunchrooms much more closely than they did when I was a high school student).

YET THE IDEA makes me laugh a lot because I can remember back to when I was a high school student and I used to go out of my way to avoid using the restrooms at school.

I also remember that I was not alone among the student body. There were many of us who weren’t enthused about the school restrooms.

Now I’m not about to share horror stories of aging facilities that stank from decades of urine and other foul odors. I actually attended a high school that was less than a decade old when I was there. Everything about the building reeked of cleanliness and sterility.

It was a cleanliness freak’s dream.

BUT NOW WE can cue in our minds that old song by Brownsville Station. “Smokin’ in the Boys Room.” There were those students (probably the parents of the current restroom malcontents) who tried to spend their time in the “facilities” rather than try to learn something in class.

Which means that one of the unofficial things that a student tried to keep in mind was which of the restrooms was going to stink not of human waste, but of cigarette smoke. Which ones were likely to be filled with students who might not be too concerned about breaking rules, and might try harassment just for kicks.

Then again, they may want to harass, but might have been so stoned that they wouldn’t have been physically capable of doing too much.

With that in mind, it just became more practical to think of restroom functions as something to be avoided unless necessary.

HOW STRONG WAS this sentiment in my mind?

I recently had to go back to my old high school as a reporter-type person to cover a news event. During the event, I felt that urge that couldn’t be withheld.

So I went and found a “boy’s room” and did my business – when it suddenly occurred to me that I was in one of the restrooms that I would have tried to avoid as a student.

So some 28 years after graduation, I finally “did my business” in one of those rooms (which I must admit stunk from decades of tobacco fumes – even though the whole building now is officially a “no smoking” zone).

I AS A student would have fought to avoid the restroom, while it seems officials at Evergreen Park High School are determined to spend their academic careers in “the loo.”

Have teenagers really changed that much in three decades’ time? I doubt it. Somehow, it seems to me that school administrators have come up with an over-reaction to a problem – one that will do nothing to resolve the situation.

For I don’t see how “after school” sessions will do anything to truly make up for class time lost due to a restroom break. Is someone clocking students to see how long they were on “the potty?”

Does this mean teachers will have to stay after school to try to re-teach what was already taught? Or will students merely sit pointlessly in a quiet room after school?

WHAT A WASTE of time!

But it does show that at least one thing hasn’t changed about high school throughout the years – there are always bound to be some school administrators whose reaction to a situation will be a layer of bureaucratic nonsense.

It’s no wonder that, for me, high school was something to be endured before I could go off to college – which is where life truly became enjoyable.

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Crime gets stupid in Chicago metro area

The Naked City, with its eight million stories, may have been a reference to New York City and its variety of violence and garishness.

Yet when one considers that the greater Chicago metropolitan area (I’m counting all those suburbs in the collar counties) has in excess of eight million people as well, I can’t help but wonder if our very own Second City has become the Midwestern counterpart that could provide the same kind of tackiness required to provide for weekly doses of tawdriness.

PERHAPS I’M OVER-REACTING, but it is my reaction after scouring the Chicago papers (or their websites) on Wednesday, and finding all kinds of stupid crime stories that are less bothersome for what was done to someone, but instead are creepy because we have people in our society who were stupid enough to think they could get away with it.

One of them involves a former football player at Glenbard West High School who on Wednesday had bond set at $50,000 on charges that he and a teammate raped a teenage girl in the backseat of a car.

The rape occurred just over a year ago, yet officials were distracted by the fact that the two teenage football players were in an automobile accident the same night as the rape – in fact, about one hour later.

The teammate was killed, which means the focus was on the fact that a teenage life was lost. But amidst the wreckage from that car accident, police were able to recover the physical evidence that ultimately was used to justify the charges that were filed against the 18-year-old, who was arrested by police in Glen Ellyn while he was on his way to school.

HE GOES FROM being the football hero who survived a deadly crash, to being a suspected rapist. Perhaps we should just be thankful that the accident didn’t totally crowd out consideration of what happened to the teenage girl – who was able to identify one of her attackers.

Not to diminish the seriousness of sexual assault, but this wasn’t even the most pathetic crime story from high school I read on Wednesday.

That “honor” would have to go to the account of the Evanston Township High School student who brought brownies to school and shared them with his fellow students – sending four of them to area hospitals.

This 17-year-old genius (heavy sarcasm intended here) laced his brownies with a large dose of marijuana. Yet before you start getting all critical of the kid for slipping something into an edible, consider that everybody who ate the brownies knew what they were laced with.

NEWSPAPER ACCOUNTS INDICATE that while expulsion is possible (on the grounds that it violates school rules to dispense mood-altering substances on school property), it also is possible that he will get something resembling a couple of weeks suspension.

Yet I can’t help but wonder about the people who knowingly ate those brownies. Somehow, they just don’t come across as victims to me.

Somebody probably got all giggly before taking a bite of brownie, thinking they were going to go trippin’ big time. Instead, all they got was the trip to the nurse’s office, followed up by the trip to the area hospital – where they had to confess to medical personnel just how lame-brained they were in their choice of dessert consumption.

School officials say that those who are involved in school sports, clubs or other activities may find themselves removed as a form of discipline, which just seems too mild to me.

THEN, THERE WAS the story that truly was a “blast from the past,” so to speak. A young man who was shooting video with a Fuji-brand digital camera for a class project had it snatched by some thugs while riding on a CTA “el” train.

He got the camera back because of the intervention of a man with the Guardian Angel patrols, although the three “Angels” apparently engaged in a fistfight with the would-be camera robbers in order to get it back, and to subdue two of them until police arrived to make the arrest.

The end result was that two men are now charged with robbery and misdemeanor battery, and bond was set for the two on Wednesday at $75,000 and $50,000.

While it was nice to see that someone didn’t get away with petty crime on the “el,” what is more shocking to me was the presence of the Guardian Angels, whom I didn’t realize were still in operation in Chicago. I recall their heyday back in the 1970s when they tried to create the image of taking back the streets of New York, and kind of assumed they went the way of polyester leisure suits since I can't recall the last time I saw them on the streets of Chicago.

SO PERHAPS IT is appropriate that we end with this New York offshoot trying to bring sense to the streets of Chicago. For to paraphrase the famed closing narration from the hit television show of the late 1950s:

There are eight million stories in the Naked City. These have been three of them.

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