Dawes School Gets a Makeover

Evanston’s Dawes Elementary School hummed like a beehive Tuesday when near 400 National Education Association (NEA) volunteers spent the day revitalizing the aging building as part of the group’s 15th annual Outreach to Teach day.

Over the course of seven hours, workers replaced 50 classroom countertops and 100 cabinet doors, assembled more than 40 pieces of new furniture, installed six plastic raised gardening beds, decorated about 30 bulletin boards, painted two murals in the school’s entryway, sanded down paneling throughout the school, repainted several rooms, and planted more than 75 flowers, plants, and trees scattered around the school’s garden and campus.

Dawes was chosen from a small pool of Chicagoland schools to receive the near $100,000 renovation after Jean Luft, president of the District 65 Educators’ Council, applied for the school makeover.

The National Education Association, a teachers' professional organization and labor union, hosts a school renovation project each year in the city or area where the NEA Representative Assembly and corresponding student leadership conference are held. This year that city is Chicago. Outreach to Teach is a NEA Student Program project, and is staffed primarily by student and retired teachers.

Kimberly Anderson, organizational specialist and Outreach to Teach coordinator for the NEA Student Program, said that Dawes was chosen in part because the school needed work that didn’t require skilled labor and could be completed by volunteers. The school’s close community ties were also a deciding factor.

 “One of the big draws for this school over the others is that they have a very close relationship with their PTA and the community around the school,” Anderson said. “The PTA already had a list of things they wanted to do for the school…but it would take them 10 years to do these things if they did them one at a time…So we said, we can do this for you.”

Dawes music teacher Stephanie Abudayeh said that the cleaning and reorganizing of the auditorium’s stage would make the most difference to her, but that everyone in the building would benefit from the makeover.

“We have 10 big performances on that stage a year,” Abudayeh said, “and it’s always a challenge to work around the storage spaces. Now I can stage [the kids] as they need to be staged…There was a teacher who came in a little late today, and she walked around and just started crying, because these are projects that we have had on our to-do list for years, and here they are all getting done.”

Dawes Principal Karen Bradley said that changes to the school’s library would be very noticeable.

“I’m most excited about the makeover in our library,” Bradley said, “because we have some pictures of our library from the 1960s and not much has changed. So now it’s going to be more modern, bright and friendly.”

Bradley also pointed to additions in the school’s garden as important. A small grill and durable plastic garden beds were installed in the school’s garden, which is used to teach science, nutrition, and math to students who plant and harvest a variety of vegetables.

Chicago area radio stations Power 92 Chicago (92.3 FM) and La Ley (107.9 FM) were present during the day’s events, conducting on-location interviews and playing music for the volunteers.

Evanston’s Chute Middle School and Oakton Elementary School were both considered for the renovation project, but an NEA representative said they were not chosen because their needs were not a good fit for the program.

Tuesday’s project represents the second time the Outreach to Teach program has renovated a Chicago-area school. The group selected a South Side school in 2000. Last year, the NEA worked on Belle Chasse High School, an institution just outside of New Orleans that has doubled as a hurricane shelter.