Back to the main Media page Lands' End Founder a Huge Donor to School for Poor Kids By Sandra Guy, Chicago Sun-Times, 02.11.04 People in the retail industry know Gary Comer as a sailing enthusiast whose passion led him to found the Lands' End catalog and Internet retailing business. Comer, a native of the South Side Brookdale neighborhood (now a part of Grand Crossing), watches along the sidelines these days at Sears, Roebuck and Co. struggles to figure how Lands' End clothing can sell in its urban markets. But Comer is no outsider to inner-city schools in Chicago, and he has become a hero to a private school run by the De La Salle Christian Brothers at 819 N. Leamington in the Austin community on the West Side. Comer recently donated $3 million to the school, called the San Miguel Gary Comer Campus, because he supports its founders' back-to-the-basics philosophy. Comer helped get the school started three years ago with a $1.2 million grant. The Christian Brothers, a Catholic teaching order dedicated to educating the poor, founded the school and another one in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. The Brothers opened the first of the order's two schools at 1949 W. 48th St. in the Back of the Yards community in June 1995. It has 76 students in grades 6 through 8 and helps mentor the students and provide them scholarships as tehy go through high school. The Austin campus opened two years ago. It has 60 students in grades 5 through 8. Both schools are in congressional districts with the two highest high school dropout rates in Illinois. At both schools, students attend class from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on a year-round schedule. They sit in small, day-long classes with two teachers in each class, and use PCs in the classroom to advance their reading, math and language-arts skills. Each student has a private Internet account and manages his or her pace of learning. Families pay $300 to $600 in yearly tuition per student, based on their ability to pay. The schools have waiting lists approximately the same as the number of students they have. Comer said the school model and its PC-centric learning approach are "terrific." He said he was impressed by the fifth-graders' proficiency with a mouse when he taught a class in Web-searching at the Austin campus. The Austin school is "a first step towards breaking the educational barrier that perpetuates the cycle of poverty," said Comer. He said the average cost of jailing someone is $1.7 million to $2.3 million. "If I put $1 million into that school and save one kid, I've doubled my investment," he said. Gordon Hannon, principal of the Gary Comer Campus and co-founder of the San Miguel Schools with Brother Ed Siderewicz, said the two campuses operate on a $2 million yearly budget that comes almost entirely from individual donations. Without single donations of as little as $10, "we'd be sunk," Hannon said. A key reason for the schools' survival is that more than half the teaching and support staff are volunteers who live in commune-like settings to cut expenses. "It's a new phenomenon in the Catholic church, like an urban Peace Corps, for the very young to sign up for two years of service by teaching, Hannon said. Caprice Smalley, 27, a sixth-grade reading and math teacher who serves as the Austin campus' dean of students, knows how important a role model a teacher can be. Smalley grew up in the Henry Horner public housing complex and credits his high-school teachers for "showing me the right way." He enjoys giving the students in his 14-member class individual attention, and credits the schools' programs with getting many parents to get involved. At the end of each day, students take part in what is called the Renaissance program, where activities range from chess games to golfing lessons to bicycle mechanics. "The students experience success here," Hannon said. "They've not had that experience before, and it fires them up. Success breeds success."