There Goes An Alpha Nan Rockefeller Award To Psychiatrist Comer
Brother JAMES P. COMER, Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center and Associate Dean of Yale Medical School, was awarded a $10,000 Rockefeller Public Service Award for broadening opportunities for youth.. Brother Comer is being honored for developing a public elementary school program that encourages low-income minority children to grow intellectually and emotionally. During more than a decade of work with the parents, teachers, and students of predominantly black Martin Luther King School, Dr. Comer built an environment of trust, confidence, and cooperation within the school that led to markedly improved student behavior and achievement. Comer outlines the program in his recently published book — School Power — and is himself currently involved in training other educators to replicate his model. James Comer believes that the schools provide an unparalleled opportunity to intervene positively in the lives of disadvantaged children. Thus he welcomed the opportunity offered to him in 1968 to direct the Baldwin-King School Program of the Yale Child Study Center where earlier he had been a fellow in Child Psychiatry. Since that time, Dr. Comer has applied his training in medicine, human development, and social psychology to the task of upgrading performance in the inner-city schools of New Haven, Connecticut. Dr. Comer's premise is that learning can improve only when the behavior problems plaguing urban schools are significantly reduced. Together with his staff, he focused on breaking down the many barriers inhibiting effective collaboration among all the members of the King School community. His team also worked to develop a consensus on educational objectives within the 4
school and to involve parents as well as school professionals in its operation and governance. Eventually as relationships were strengthened, Dr. Comer turned his attention to the curriculum. A supplemental "social skills curriculum" — tailored to teach minority pupils the skills commonly picked up by middle class children in the home — was integrated into the regular academic course. By 1979, even though the neighborhood around the King School continued to deteriorate, Comer's strategy began to pay off. Test scores improved significantly (up almost to grade level in math and reading), absenteeism diminished and serious disciplinary problems virtually disappeared. Formal training was only one source of Dr. Comer's insight into the complex problems he confronted at the King School. As he himself suggests in his book Beyond Black and White "... the other was my own experience of growing up black in a white-controlled America." Although Comer had been successful in the integrated East Chicago, Indiana, schools, going on to college at Indiana University and medical school at Howard, he was acutely aware that most of his black classmates — many with undereducated, poor parents like his own and some with abilities equal to his — were badly scarred by the schools. In those early years, they e s t a b l i s h e d patterns of lifelong underachievement and failure. Later, volunteer work with the hard-core poor in Washington, D.C., deepened Comer's concern about the cost — in human terms and in national terms — of lives burdened by poverty and broken by unresponsive institutions. He resolved to refocus his own career from the private practice of medicine to public health and child and family psychiatry. Comer returned to graduate school at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health where his Master's thesis centered on the potential of elementary schools to prevent social and psychological problems in young children. In his work at the Martin Luther King School, Dr. Comer has put his theory to the test and has shown that an improvement in the elementary school experience of minority children can result in improved opportunities. The Rockefeller Public ° ..je Awards recognize outstanding acnievements in the public interest. Five awards have been presented annually since 1952 when the program was established by the late John D. Rockefeller, III. Over the years these
awards have become widely regarded as the highest honor for citizens working in service to the public. The program is administered by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs of Princeton University.
The fudge Retires
Brother SIDNEY A. JONES, Jr., Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County, retired on December 1, 1980. Judge Jones was elected Judge in December, 1960, and completed 20 years of judicial service on December 1, 1980. He was retained in 1966, in 1972, and in 1978, for 6-year terms. Judge Jones legal career began in 1931 when he graduated from Northwestern University Law School with honors, including election to the honorary legal fraternity, the Order Of The Coif. He entered the practice of law with Brother Albert B. George, who was the first Black Judge elected in Chicago, or the nation, and Charles J. Jenkins, a member of the Illinois Legislature. Judge George served in the Municipal Court of Chicago from 1924 to 1930. In 1939, Judge Jones joined the legal staff of the United States Department of Labor, where he served as Senior Attorney until 1945. In 1945, he resigned and returned to the practice of law with the late James B. Cashin and Brother Edward B. Toles, now a United States Bankruptcy Judge. After the death of James B. Cashin, Judge Jones' associates, in addition to Mr. Toles, included Cecil A. Partee, Brother James A. McLendon, and Hollis L. Green and Odas Nicholson, until he was elected judge. Judge Jones served as Alderman of the 6th Ward from 1955 to 1959. He worked to end abuses in the schools, fought police misconduct, introduced an ordinance or resolution to ask the General Assembly to pay a salary of, at least, $10,000 a year to members of the Board of Education, and obtained many parking lots and playlots for his Ward. The Sphinx / Winter 1980