Educators and students from Gale Community Academy spoke Thursday to more than 15 Northwestern students about the challenges facing Chicago Public Schools.

The event, hosted by NU Leadership Development and Community Engagement, featured principal Augustine Emuwa and assistant principal Melinda Jean-Baptiste from the Rogers Park public school. Emuwa and Jean-Baptiste spoke about their work connecting with Chicago communities to bring better education to K-8 students. Three eighth graders also spoke alongside the administrators.

Emuwa, who has been a teacher and administrator with CPS for seven years, said he grew up on the South Side in a single-parent household, and school was his only “place of solace.” He said he has realized his life dream by trying to create a solace for his own students.

“The power of the community is the reason why we are still here,” Emuwa said. “Why is our community not good enough for this school to be called a community? We deal with race. We deal with inferiority complexes, and we got to really change that narrative because our community is good enough. This school is good enough.”

Emuwa said Illinois is one of the “worst-funded” states in the country, and the disparity in wealth between one city and another is immense.

Jean-Baptiste said her own upbringing without many opportunities also motivated her to help other disadvantaged students. She said insufficient funds can prevent public schools from hiring well-qualified teachers.

Because schools are funded through property taxes, Jean-Baptiste said, schools in low-income neighborhoods don’t receive as much money as those in areas with higher property values. As a result, funding per student in Evanston is three times higher than that at Gale, Jean-Baptiste said.

“For me, school was not necessarily a happy place because when you go to school it becomes very clear who has and who does not have,” she said. “School at times for me became very uncomfortable in my elementary years.”

Val Buchanan, assistant director of Leadership Development and Community Engagement for NU, told The Daily it’s helpful for students to understand the complexities of the CPS system. She said she wanted to host the event to “motivate students to be interested in education equity” and hear about CPS problems first-hand.

Weinberg freshman Emily Kasprick told The Daily she learned more about how income disparity affects education in Illinois. After hearing the students’ experiences, she said she wanted to do more to help.

“The justice talk was really impactful, especially the way they presented it by letting the kids answer questions,” she said. “It was things I’d never considered, so to see the differences people have to live with, it was shocking.”

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