After questions about new S. Side school, mayor’s office fills in blanks

The shrieking erupted the second an architectural rendition of the planned addition to Wildwood Elementary School became visible, even before Mayor Rahm Emanuel entered the classroom to announce details of the annex he’s proposing to build on the badly overcrowded Edgebrook school.

Monday’s announcement of a new Northwest Side school construction project was a far cry from the amorphous announcement Emanuel made Sunday night about a plan to build a new Southeast Side school on a polluted parcel of land — once owned by the relative of a disgraced former alderman. As concerned Gallistel Language Academy parents tried to ask questions about the fate of their own building, Emanuel walked out, leaving Ald. John Pope (10th) to attempt answers.

Wildwood parents, however, applauded the mayor’s plan that’ll add a dedicated lunchroom and 16 classrooms to the school CPS deems at 175 percent capacity — or serving some 420 kids in 2012-13 in a building meant for 240, according to the formula the district used to close schools. Flanked by Ald. Mary O’Connor (41st), state Sen. John D’Amico (D-Chicago), and Board of Education vice president Jesse Ruiz, Emanuel said “Making sure kids can read, making sure they understand the fundamentals . . . that’s the challenge, not how to figure out how to shuffle kids from one end to the other [of the school] because you have no space.”

As the mayor left the building, refusing to answer questions from the news media, Principal Mary Beth Cu-- nat, who’s testified before the Board of Education with parents asking for any solution to the overcrowding, said she didn’t believe the plan until she heard it “from the horse’s mouth.”

She’ll finally get an office instead of boxes in a closet; her kids won’t have to learn in hallways, either. Her annex will start construction in the summer of 2014 and will open in fall 2015.

“This is really happening,” she said as an ecstatic parent approached, screaming, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Another mother of a sixthgrader, a first-grader and a preschooler, Holly Gutierrez said the school has managed well with the little space it’s had.

“We have gone through everything from switching classrooms to multiple years in the mobiles [temporary classrooms], to sitting in hallways, eating the classrooms, we’ve seen it all,” she said.

State money will pay for both new projects in the cash-strapped district, according to Kelley Quinn, a spokeswoman for the city’s Office of Budget and Management.