Fenger parents meet with Daley, Jackson, CPS

Making Carver Military Academy a dual school is one of the ideas the Chicago Board of Education is considering, board president Michael Scott said this morning after a roughly 90-minute meeting with parents from a Chicago public housing complex, Mayor Daley and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Last week CPS officials said it would open enrollment at Carver on the Far South Side for students who no longer wanted to attend Fenger High School in the wake of a fatal beating there. But some people questioned whether some Fenger students would qualify for Carver's selective enrollment.

Derrion Albert, 16, was killed outside a community center near Fenger, where a feud between students from the neighborhood around the school and those from the Altgeld Gardens public housing complex erupted in a brawl that killed Albert. His fatal beating was captured on video and circulated on the Web, prompting a national outcry.

This morning Scott said about 120 students who attend Fenger could create another school inside Carver.

"The big issue, of course, is that we have to first identify the magnitude of the problem," Scott said. "Right now our staff tells us that there are only 120 children [from Altgeld Gardens who go to Fenger], but we've been told by the parents that far more are affected because several of them have dropped out; several of them do not go to the school because of fear. So we need to very quickly find out the dimensions of the problem before we make any final decisions."

-- Kristen Schorsch

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