The School Play

I took a brief hiatus from my work at Senn High School to work at another school, Stone Academy, a K-8 magnet school in the neighborhood of Edgewater, on the far north side of Chicago. When I first signed on with CPS Lives, I had three requirements for the school in which I would work. First, it had to have an interesting story. Second, as I have other things going on in my life, it had to be reasonably close to home. Most important, for my children’s sake it could not be a school that either of them attended. Stone fit the first two requirements. I threw caution to the wind after one of my daughter’s teachers, a co-director of the annual school play asked me to make production photographs. It was hard to resist the request for many reasons, not the least of which, it gave me the opportunity to give a little back to the school our family has been a part of for the past twelve years. In our time at Stone, our children have had more than their share of outstanding teachers under the direction of three excellent principals. Yet a public school’s success depends upon more than a staff of highly motivated professionals. It takes a strong commitment from parents, especially in this day of ever dwindling support for public education, to enable a school to provide children with more than a rudimentary education.

Stone Academy is blessed with a support group led by parents who with the help of faculty, administration, the Local School Council and the PTA, make events such as the school play a reality, an event that schools in more affluent districts take for granted. Incorporated in 2008, Friends of Stone Academy (FOSA) has raised funds to cover the costs of a variety of supplemental academic, athletic and arts programs, with the expressed goal of providing these opportunities at no cost to students and their families. From FOSA’s mission statement: “These programs promote literacy, cultural awareness, and contribute to the educational, physical, and emotional development of our children.”

The photographs I’ll be posting this week of Stone Academy’s production of “Fiddler on the Roof“ and some of the preparation leading up to it, are testimony to the hard work, commitment and dedication of the students, faculty, administration and our fellow parents of Stone, and to the tireless efforts of the members of FOSA, past present and future. Without them and like-minded organizations, opportunities such as these for our children would be little more than a pipe dream.