Chicago Love-in

Windy City gets a new Super

Detroit School Superintendent Arthur Jefferson was a leading candidate for the vacant top job in the Chicago school system. He turned it down. No wonder. The nation's third largest school system, with 458,000 students, is racked by money problems. It will close ten schools this month, and a third of the extracurricular programs have been canceled. Unless fur ther budget cuts are made, the system faces a projected $46 million deficit. Convinced that no outsider could cope with Chicago politics, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, along with the five black members of the city's eleven-member school board, pressed for the appointment of Chicago's veteran deputy superintendent, Manford Byrd, 52. But the other board members felt Byrd is too closely associated with past mismanagement to rebuild the school sys tem. Last week Chicago picked Ruth B. Love, 48, superintendent of schools in Oakland, Calif, and a former director of the Right to Read program. Love will be the nation's highest-paid school superintendent at $120,000 a year. Even at that price, she says, "I'm not looking forward to a rose garden, and I'm sure I won't find one." qed

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.