Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School

The students are not disciplined and are extremely rude & disrespectful to the teachers and other students. It seems that no one is in charge or wants to take responsibility for leadership of the school environment, and the worst behaviors are tolerated, as though someone forgot that a school is a place for learning. We have seen and heard terrible things there. It seems like the leaders there spend all of their time discussing buzzword topics like diversity, race, inclusion, equity, gender, rather than doing the actual business of teaching students their subjects and how to behave. This is not a serious learning environment.

From the community's perspective, we see students who are very poorly managed outside. There is constant profanity of the most vulgar kind at high volumes throughout the day, after school, and at student events. This occurs in the presence of staff, administrators, and an Oak Park police officer assigned to the school. Students play on a concrete field they call the "prison yard" they and the balls run into busy traffic. The reports from inside the school that we have heard match much of what we see outside, and more increasingly over the past ten years. If your children are considering attending, it would be best to observe the school during different times of day, both inside and out, and after school. The lunch time is the worst, from what we can see. Our rating is based on what we see daily, and have heard from others who have attended.

Student management at Brooks leaves much to be desired. Students outside the building scream strings of the vilest profanity (males and females) at all hours of the school day and into the evening. Students play sports in the street, run in front of cars, chase balls in traffic--all the while staff, administrators, and a police officer look on and do nothing. If this is what is occurring outside, it is hard to imagine that classroom instruction is any more ordered or respectful.