Staff gets an education helping Chicago schools.

LIKE ITS "SWEAT EQUITY" program, in which loan officers and executives spend a day working for business borrowers, efforts by Chicago's Cole Taylor Bank to work with public school students also gets the employees out of the office.

But unlike most of the "sweat equity" effort, the bank's participation in "total quality schools" and "bank at schools" programs puts employees in the heart of minority neighborhoods.

While the "sweat equity" program is intended to help employees of $1.5 billion-asset Cole Taylor learn the businesses to which they lend, the school programs will favorably influence the bank's Community Reinvestment Act rating, says Kevin Tynan, president of Tynan Marketing Inc. Chicago, Moreover, "The long-term possibilities are that [the programs] may develop business for the bank," he said.

Mr. Tynan stressed "long term," because banking is foreign to many residents of urban areas. For example, at Beethoven Elementary school, which draws its student body mainly from nearby public housing, students are far more familiar with check cashers than with banks, says Sidney I Taylor, chairman and chief executive of Cole Taylor Financial Group Inc., Wheeling, Ill.

Mr. Taylor, who is determined to teach disadvantaged kids that there's more to banking than turning a check into cash, is leading by example. "Nothing significant can happen unless the very top of the bank is involved with people on the firing line," he said.

As a corporate volunteer in the Total Quality Schools program developed by Northwestern University's J.L. Kellog Graduate School of Management, he helps the principal and staff of a South Side grade school learn modern management skills.

The program is patterned on "total quality management" principles developed by consultant W. Edwards Deming. It seeks to improve businesses' product or service quality by restructuring traditional management.

Cole Taylor last year kicked in seed money for the program and Mr. Taylor enlisted volunteers through his membership in a Chicago executives group.

The program teams Kellogg student and faculty and corporate volunteers with school employees, explained Stuart Greenbaum, director of Kellog's banking research center.

Mr. Taylor works with predominantly Hispanic Seward Elementary School, helping its staff address like poor attendance and discipline, and overcrowding.

Cole Taylor also participates in the Illinois bank-at-school program, in which a branch run by senior vice president George J. Havelka holds "basic banking" seminars for the parents of students at the Beethoven school. Students also learn how to open bank accounts.

While most Cole Taylor branches participate in the program, Mr. Havelka said his may be the only one to give older students teller training to handle schoolmates' deposits at a mock branch. The money then is deposited in the branch.

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