Class of 1983 Kanoon

Jennifer Heer Norman

I attended Kanoon beginning in about jan or feb 1979 and was enrolled in the middle of 5th, with Mrs. Fabros (sp) class in Feb. of 1979 when the school opened for us, they didn't offically open it until 1980 September).  We really hated her.  She made us for punishment purposes write what ever we did; which was usually two lines of lined paper long; between 500 to sometimes 500 times on paper and work on that in class and bring in the next day.  I don't know how that helped us learned stuff when we spent the whole class most of the time doing punishments instead of getting taught.  Anyway, have a photo of that class somewhere, I'll try to find it.

Dr. Rudolph Salmeron was the first principal interim until one was selected for the school I think, and he knew that my mom(Debbie Heer) was a teacher at Robert Burns Elementary and had her three kids enrolled there and at Cardenas which was also new.  He asked her to transfer all of us to the new magnet school, Kanoon to encourage other white and black and non-Hispanic families to transfer their kids there.  Well, we all transferred and this was in 1979, my 4^th grade teacher at Robert Burns also transferred so I ended up having her as my 6^th teacher as well at Kanoon, she is Gretchen Mobley (she currently is in touch with me and lives with her son in Decatur, IL). 

Our teacher's then, were; Gretchen Mobley, Joseph Rodriguez, Patricia Williams, and principal Robert Murphy(though he was only principal for a short time when we all graduated, we had Amy Weiss Narea as vice-principal and a lot of the time when we were between principals she was it too)