Dunbar H.S. to prepare students for jobs in construction trades

Dunbar Vocational High School will return to its World War II roots - by preparing students for lucrative jobs in the construction trades that provide an alternative to gangs - under a mayoral plan unveiled Monday.

"If you graduate from high school and you have a tomorrow you're thinking about, you're not going to do something stupid today. If you're in a gang, a lot of these kids don't think they're going to live to 24. A skill, an education, a training, gives you a tomorrow to live for," Emanuel told a news conference at Dunbar, 3000 S. Martin Luther King Drive.

"The biggest piece of confronting violence is providing people opportunity and hope and having the trades in the schools will allow you to do that ... It's not just the trades. If you want to run your own plumbing business. If you want to run your own home business in the sense of fix-up, you'll have the skill set here to do that."

Starting this fall, the vocational high school with a student body of 658 that's 97 percent African-American will be known as the "Construction Trades Campus at Dunbar."

See the Chicago Sun-Times for the full story.