Chicago City Wire

The threat level of an eighth grader recently bringing a gun to a Chicago elementary school was much higher under the police recount of the incident than under the school’s take on it.

The school, the Mary Courtney Language Arts Center in Uptown, said in a letter to school families that the police on Dec. 14 “took possession of an unloaded gun.” News reports identified the student as an eighth grader.

The police narrative of the same incident, dated Dec.15, said that a school security officer confronted a student who the day before told some fellow students of his plan to shoot teachers “he didn’t like.” (The school made no mention of this in its letter to the families). After refusing to be searched, the student was brought inside to a guidance counselor’s office where he relented to a voluntary search and “reached into his sweatshirt pocket and handed them an extended 30 round capacity magazine loaded with an unknown amount of live rounds.”

Pedro Martinez, Chief Executive Officer, CPS

Police were then contacted. Responding officers placed the student in custody and upon a search of his backpack found a “brown in color P80 frame Polymer80 ghost 9 mm semi-automatic firearm with a 4.5 barrel length, unknown serial number, containing an unknown amount of live rounds in the magazine along with a live round inside the chamber.”

The school’s watered down take on the incident is not uncommon, Joseph Giacalone, adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the former commanding officer of the NYPD’s Bronx Cold Case Squad, told Chicago City Wire.

“They’re trying to protect the child but the cost of doing so only increases the problem,” he said. “The problem doesn’t go away. It either gets picked up in the next grade or another school.”

“This policy by the progressives,” he added, “is not based on any science. They are not getting to the source. They are just setting up a vicious pattern.”

Former Chicago Teacher’s Union official John Kugler, who once served on the union’s safety committee, places the blame for the gloss over of the incident at the feet of Jadine Chou, the head of security at Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Kugler told Chicago City Wire that Chou habitually covers up the details of school violence.

“She breaks the law repeatedly,” Kugler said.

He said that CPS was also not forthcoming about the details into Dec. 16 shooting in front of the Benito Juarez High School on the West Side. Two teens were killed and two wounded in the incident.

“I’m still digging up all details on what really happened,” Kugler said. “All I can tell you now that what happened is different from what the school said happened.”

In a December blog post on Substance News, Kugler wrote that Chou chooses “politics over student safety.”

“She was caught covering up student and gang murders in 2015 and in 2013, having no security plans after the Sandy Hook school massacre, yet she kept her job,” Kugler wrote.

“In 2015, Ms. Chou was found to have violated state laws regarding student deaths in schools. Federal law requires reporting of all deaths within eight hours. CPS claims providing the information is 'burdensome.' [FOIA Request for Review 2015 PAC 37475 (Kugler)].”

In July 2020, Benito Juarez voted to end a police presence at the school. 

CPS did not respond to a request for comment.