This is the second installment in our occasional series on poverty and segregation in Chicago’s schools.
This isn’t a new development. It’s a legacy of the racial segregation that has characterized Chicago and its public schools for decades. In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, the schools here changed from predominantly white and middle-class to overwhelmingly black, Hispanic, and low-income.
Why do such parents choose to move? Can anything be done to keep them?
“We sold the house for what we paid for it nine years ago,” Sue says. “Our buyers got a free rehab. We lost like $200,000. That’s college tuition money, just gone.”
Sandro, 45, is a business development manager for USA Today who also works mainly from home. He grew up in a high-rise on Sheridan Road in Edgewater and attended Saint Gertrude elementary and Saint Ignatius high schools. Both schools were about 70 percent white and 30 percent minority, he says. He took a train and a bus to Saint Ignatius, on the Near South Side. He had to wait for the bus in an “extremely sketchy” area, but he’s glad he had that commuting experience. “It made me street-smart, made me grow up quicker.”
North Park has one of the lower crime rates in the city, but the safety of their children factored into the Serras’ decision to move. Though there were owner-occupied homes on the corners of their block, “everything else was rentals up and down the street, so it was a very transient kind of neighborhood,” Sue says.
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Her daughters used to beg her to let them ride their bikes around the block. But doing so meant crossing the mouth of an alley twice. “Cars would come flying down that alley,” Sue says. “I let them do it once, and they came back petrified because a car had almost hit them. So they never even asked again.”
