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Brian Piccolo School
1040 N. Keeler Ave.
Chicago, Illinois 60651
Tel. 773-534-4425 Fax. 773-534-4248
The Brian Piccolo Specialty School is located
on the West Side of Chicago, in an area composed of bungalows,
greystone two and three flats and some light industry. The
community has evolved from a predominantly Italian-Polish
population to a racial-ethnic population of Hispanic and
African-American families.
The school was originally built in 1918 as
a K-8 elementary school, and named after Rezin Orr, a union
activist. An addition was built in 1966 to accommodate high
school students from the nearby over-crowded Marshall High
School, and the school was reduced to a K-5 Unit.
In 1973, the high school students were transferred
to a new building at Chicago and Pulaski Avenues, which
took the name of Rezin Orr with it to become Orr High School.
The old Orr building was designated to continue housing
the K-5 unit and to also house a middle school (grades 6-8).
The building was renamed Brian Piccolo Elementary School
after Brian Piccolo, a football player for the Chicago Bears
whose life was memorialized by the motion picture, "Brian's
Song".
It was felt that Piccolo would provide a role-model
to emphasize cooperation and team spirit needed to develop
amongst the many diverse groups in the community.
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This
class is composed of fifteen students from the fourth,fifth, and
sixth grades. They will be studying dinosaurs in depth in May,
but wrote to Project Exploration as part of a unit exploring the
similarities and differences of desert and rainforest ecology.
They are eagerly awaiting a reply form the Saharan expedition.
