Reaching Chicagoland’s disconnected youth
Start looking and you’ll notice it everywhere. In nearly every tragic news story — about abused children, suburban school shootings, gang violence — one detail appears again and again: Someone in the story has dropped out of school.
In April, the Tribune wrote about E’Lonye Harris, a 17-year-old victim of Chicago’s gun violence. In late 2018, he was shot three times on his way to a convenience store near his South Side home.
“Though he recovered enough to go home,” the Tribune reported, “the walk to Ombudsman Chicago South High School, around the corner from the shooting, proved too much. He dropped out a month later.”
Over and over, the dropout thread appears — a marker that yet another young person’s life may well be unraveling.
A young person walks away. A crisis awaits.
This isn’t a new revelation. But its endurance across the Chicago metropolis should alarm all of us. Challenge us. Activate us.
For decades the Tribune has been covering the issues that put kids at risk of leaving the school system. Of leaving mainstream Chicago — for life. Of leaving the path that should lead our city’s young people to productive, independent and prosperous lives.
We’ve reported on programs that help young people get jobs after they drop out of school. And we’ve applauded Chicago Public Schools for improving the district’s graduation rate: At one point, only about half of CPS students made it to graduation; in 2018 nearly 80% earned a diploma.
A quiet torrent of the lost
Progress. Yet the problem persists. Those of us who live here, who’ve invested our futures here, tacitly accept this quiet exit of young people by the thousands. They are a quiet torrent of the lost. Each departure from school and its school community, each arrival at a future suddenly less than it could be, is an opportunity lost — for the ex-student but also for Chicago and its surround. Tomorrow’s potential contributor to a more thriving metropolis instantly increases his or her odds of joblessness and dependency.
Too many young people fall through the cracks — an estimated 6,000 CPS freshmen aren’t expected to make it to graduation, according to Communities in Schools, a dropout prevention group. Nationally, 11.5% of Americans ages 16-24 are neither in school nor working, according to 2017 data from the Social Science Research Council. These disconnected youth are more likely to live in poverty, have a disability and be institutionalized, the research finds. By one measure, a 2012 Columbia University study, each disconnected young person costs society nearly $900,000 over his or her lifetime.
How many should Chicagoland lose before we say, ‘Enough’?
We on the Tribune Editorial Board want to tug harder at the threads of this problem, and — with your extensive assistance — explore solutions.
Six years ago, we launched an opinion leadership campaign to create a “New Plan of Chicago.” We were inspired by the great architect and planner Daniel Burnham, who in 1909 laid out a vision for Chicago’s future in his seminal Plan of Chicago, which set the stage for a century of staggering growth.
Burnham didn’t address the city’s formidable social problems, though, so we took up the challenge and asked you, our readers, to help.
The response was overwhelming, and we were flooded with thousands of ideas, big and small. After we sifted and grouped the ideas, we identified 12 proposals. We met with civic leaders from all sectors — businesses, government offices, foundations and neighborhoods — and advocated for champions to take on the proposals. We held live events, our “Chicago Forward” public policy series, so that readers could take part in the discussion. Many of those ideas, first submitted to us in 2013, are flourishing today.
An urgent mission for Tribune readers
We return to you with another request. Today, we announce the launch in January of a new and substantial “Chicago Forward” campaign: “Young lives in the balance: How to reach Chicagoland’s disconnected youth.” We hope you and your employers, your organizations, your community groups will begin thinking, talking and plotting how to make this urgent mission succeed.
As we did with New Plan of Chicago, we will lay out in more detail our challenge to you, and issue an RFP, a request for your proposals. Starting in January, we’ll expand on the problems our most vulnerable young people face, explain why this is an issue that should matter to all of us, and introduce you to community leaders who are already dedicated to solving this problem.
We’re also planning three live events in 2020 so that you can meet and hear directly from some of those leaders, and from young people who have struggled against the odds to thrive here.
‘I want to start fresh’
What’s different is that our new “Chicago Forward” project has the support of community sponsors: Bank of America and AT&T. Their financial assistance expands our resources to confront one of metropolitan Chicago’s most enduring challenges, and we’re grateful for their support. Their logos will appear on the editorial page when we’re writing about this issue. We independently will deliver the journalism, from shaping how this series of editorials unfolds, to evaluating your proposals, to advocating achievable, affordable solutions.
As 2019 winds down, we invite you to accept this first challenge: Notice the dropout thread entwined in so many stories of lost futures and, often, stories of lost lives. Notice the conditions that might have caused a young person to drop out — of school, of work, of society. Notice, too, when you do encounter it in Tribune reporting or elsewhere, the resilience of those who get back on track. Who rejoin Chicagoland’s mainstream and, one by one, help build its future.
Notice the kids like E’Lonye Harris, who after dropping out of high school was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder by a University of Chicago Medical Center psychiatrist he started seeing three times a week.
“It’s crazy,” he told our reporter, “because I did want to finish school, but I just got to change because of what happened. I want to start fresh.”