For this week’s assignment, I have mapped out all of the locations of schools participating in the Humboldt Park Community as a Campus initiative. The complex initiative which seeks to (amongst other thing) form a unified base of “feeder” elementary and middle schools in the community. They’re called “feeder” schools because they’ve historically sent students to the main neighborhood high school, Roberto Clemente Academy.
Despite the fact that Clemente has seen a remarkable ascension from a Level 3 (marker of the lowest level of quality in Chicago Public Schools) to a Level 2, International Baccalaureate school under new principal Marcey Sorensen, the high school remains stigmatized as a low-quality, majority Puerto Rican school by many of the area’s new, wealthier and whiter residents, and many longtime residents of Humboldt Park.
I think it is interesting to observe these various elementary, middle, high, and alternative schools on a map, as it illustrates the widespread geographic locations of this “community.” Humboldt Park, being a large neighborhood, naturally has many schools of many different sorts. Much of my research regarding Community as a Campus (colloquially referred to as “CAAC” to those involved) is focusing on how gentrification is affecting the rapidly changing community. This manifests itself in several ways, be it through new residents demanding that the various schools lessen their Puerto Rican identities and “clean up their image,” or by shocking underenrollment figures caused by tax hikes and displacement of longtime residents. For this reason, it’s been quite helpful to have this map as a guide to where each of the specific schools are.
A major contributor to rising property values and tax rates in the community has been the Bloomingdale Trail, or the 606. Much like New York City’s High Line, the 606 is a rehabbed former rail line that was left abandoned for several years. Now, it is a linear park that is used less as a tourist spectacle and more as a mode of safer transportation for pedestrians than the High Line. Much like the High Line, though, the 606 has spurred a rash of development in its general vicinity. Having this map is quite useful in that it locates the schools which are within walking distance of the trail, potentially informing the questions I will ask the school’s principals regarding gentrification.
In a more general sense, having these points mapped out will allow me to conduct demographic and economic research, seeing which portions of the community have higher property values and perhaps hold more new white (or non-Latinx) residents. It will also act as a nice guide for me as I navigate Humboldt Park, giving me insight into the vicinities of the schools to one another and to the community’s various main streets like Division Street and Fullerton Avenue.
Nice! I often wonder what quality means when one is measuring schools. Often, my sense is it has to do with testing scores, class size, and whether students advance to the next grade. Sometimes it also has to do with what sorts of extracurrricular — or even curricular — offerings are available. I wonder what you will learn when you interview principals in these schools? What do they see as the biggest challenges their schools face? You may want to read this article if you haven’t, which gets at some of the issues around gentrification and public schools, albeit in New York: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/magazine/choosing-a-school-for-my-daughter-in-a-segregated-city.html I’m looking forward to seeing you map other data against these locations — and maybe find out from non-Puerto Rican parents what they think about the schools?