Sarah Anderson This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. www.chicagolife.net

   www.chicagolife.net/content/ot - [Cached]

   Published on: 2/20/2008   Last Visited: 2/20/2008

   Sarah Anderson, a first grade teacher at Schiller, is a girls softball coach at the school. She's worked at Schiller for two years and is affiliated with the Academy for Urban School Leadership. Last year, she created a summer program for several eighth grade Schiller girls, focusing on softball, leadership and anger management, taking them to areas of the city they hadn't experienced, like Millennium Park, some museums and the lakefront. LeAnna, Riyah and five other girls participated. That summer the building right behind Schiller was being demolished. The kids remember "walking to the beat of the wrecking ball."
   
   "In the summer, there were so many kids out playing right here," says Sarah, whose energetic teaching philosophy revolves around giving her students the option of making good choices or bad choices.
   ...
   One afternoon, LeAnna mentioned to Sarah that she wished "people could see the good in Cabrini. People always think it's all bad." Struck by the comment, Sarah presented her girls with 35mm disposable cameras the next time they met, instructing them to document their neighborhood, the good and the bad, before it was too late. This assignment became the Neighborhood Project, a series of photographs and words describing Cabrini-Green from the youths' perspectives. The photographs, along with the words the girls wrote accompanying each of them, were hung this year in the Schiller gymnasium, and all the classes came through to look at them. Kids who'd spent their entire lives surrounded by the whites saw them from another perspective.
   
   "There were a total of a couple hundred kids who walked through the gallery and got to see it," recalls Sarah.
   ...
   "People came in off the streets, not knowing anything about Cabrini," says Sarah.
   ...
   What followed was a grant from an individual donor, which allowed Sarah to buy digital cameras for each of the girls to use. They then set out to document the demolition of 714 W. Division, which was occurring last winter. As the building became fractured, opening up to the world what the notorious interior actually looked like, the girls captured the intrigue of the rubble, a once hopeful housing development that was becoming shattered and obliterated. The sliced open rooms revealed a rainbow of colorfully painted walls.
   
   "If we can preserve a bit of Cabrini, some of the good history lives on," Sarah says.
   ...
   Sarah was in college in Indiana when she heard the tragic story of Girl X, a nine-year-old who was found in a Cabrini stairway raped, beaten, choked, poisoned with insecticide and written on with gang symbols. The story riveted her, she says, believing it's "fate" that she's now a teacher at Schiller. When she started working there, some of her family mentioned how dangerous the area is. "Everybody's heard of Cabrini-Green, and I knew that I wanted to work here," she says.
   ...
   "We all know sitting in this circle that this is going to be really expensive property," Sarah continues.

2. 2. 826 Chicago Blog » Blog Archive » Guest Blogger: Sarah Anderson

   www.826chi.org/blog/?p=29 - [Cached]

   Published on: 2/17/2006   Last Visited: 7/7/2007

   Guest Blogger: Sarah Anderson
   
   Sarah Anderson is a teacher at Schiller Elementary School. She started The Neighborhood Project: A Cabrini Green Youth Perspective in Photographs and Words with her students this past summer.

3. 3. Support Us

   www.neighborhoodproject.org/we - [Cached]

   Published on: 7/1/2005   Last Visited: 1/26/2007

   Please email Sarah Anderson at cgneighborhood@sbcglobal.net if you have any ideas or suggestions.
   ...
   Sarah Anderson Neighborhood Project Coordinator Schiller Elementary School Room 101 640 W. Scott Street Chicago, IL 60610