Beth Swanson: What is the state of Chicago's youths?
Chicago is home to a rich cultural landscape consisting of 77 neighborhoods, each with its own identity, history and sense of community. Despite the city's tremendous promise, the reality is that for far too many youths — especially those from Black and Latino communities on the South and West sides — opportunities remain out of reach. The pandemic only exacerbated these disparities, and today, young Chicagoans are navigating a climate in which their education, safety and well-being are under threat.
Recently, my organization A Better Chicago released our 2025 State of our Youth report, which provides a comprehensive snapshot of how the city's youths are faring. The report draws from the organization's Youth Opportunity Dashboard — which compiles data from publicly available sources to track youth outcomes — along with citywide surveys and focus groups. It examines the challenges and barriers young people face across the city and the interventions and investments driving positive change.
Addressing youth poverty remains an urgent challenge. The report cites nearly 1 in 4 Chicago youths through age 18 live in poverty; for the city's residents under the age of 5, that figure is 43.5%. Alarmingly, the poverty rate is as high as 90% in some Chicago communities. This has a profound impact on a child's development, as there is a clear correlation between poverty and academic outcomes. Food insecurity and weakened health often create difficulty for children to focus and learn, and youths experiencing poverty are two to three times more likely to be chronically absent from school. Further, poverty and homelessness are inextricably linked, and in 2024, youth homelessness across Chicago surpassed pre-pandemic levels.
Many Chicago youths are also facing the harsh reality of violence in their communities. Homicides are down across the city, but the Tribune reported 573 homicides in Chicago last year, with 93 of those deaths being people under the age of 20. Nearly two-thirds of youth respondents in A Better Chicago's survey said they have witnessed community violence in some form, and almost 1 in 4 said they witness violence weekly. Much like poverty, there is a correlation between exposure to violent crime and academic outcomes.
The academic story is nuanced. Third grade reading, third grade math and eighth grade math proficiency all hover around 20%, marking a drastic decline since the pandemic. There have been some promising gains, including a nearly 50% increase in eighth grade reading proficiency since 2019, and record-high high school graduation and college enrollment rates recently reported by Chicago Public Schools.
But chronic absenteeism remains a significant barrier to academic achievement. In the 2018-19 school year, roughly 15% of the student population nationwide was deemed chronically absent. By the 2022-23 school year, that percentage had grown to 28%. Here in Chicago, 41% of CPS students were chronically absent in 2024, meaning nearly half of students missed a month or more of school instruction last year.
When students become disconnected from their learning environment, the impact is far-reaching. Frequent absenteeism, even in a child's early years, can have a negative effect on academic achievement, long-term success and future earnings. The consequences are disproportionately worse for families experiencing poverty that often lack the resources to help children catch up.
So how can we support Chicago's youths in meaningful ways and improve outcomes? No one person or organization has all the answers, and city budget concerns and other constraints can make change difficult. But we do know where we can start. The answer lies in a combination of targeted interventions, increased investment and collaboration across sectors.
First and foremost, we need to prioritize housing and food security. Stable housing and access to nutritious food are fundamental for young people to succeed in school and life. We cannot expect youths to thrive when basic needs are not being met.
Second, we should expand access to mental health services. Initiatives that address trauma and prevent further harm are needed to keep youths engaged in their education and reduce the cycle of violence in our communities.
Third, we must bolster academic support. It's essential for young people to be equipped with the skills to overcome academic setbacks, setting them up to thrive in school and the workforce. This includes aggressively targeting chronic absenteeism — which is a significant barrier to learning — and improving math and reading proficiency rates.
Finally, we must increase access to community-based programs, especially in under-resourced areas of the city. Youths of all ages and backgrounds are calling for expanded access to these programs — after school, on weekends and during the summer — which offer additional safe spaces to learn and grow.
The challenges facing Chicago's youths are significant but not insurmountable. Nearly all youth survey respondents (95%) reported feeling optimistic about their future, and the vast majority are planning to further their education. This speaks to their remarkable resilience and the need for us — adults, institutions, policymakers, community leaders — to invest more deeply in the potential of every young person in this city.
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‘Where was God?' The Mother Emanuel AME Church shooting 10 years later.
Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up This was quite remarkable, because less than 48 hours earlier, on the night of June 17, 2015, Sanders had just closed her eyes in benediction — during Bible study at her beloved Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church — when she was jolted by an explosion of gunfire. The 57-year-old woman, a fourth-generation member of 'Mother Emanuel,' the oldest A.M.E. church in the South, dove under a table and pulled her 11-year-old granddaughter down with her. She squeezed the child so tightly she feared she might crush her, instructing her to play dead as a 21-year-old white supremacist methodically assassinated nine of the 12 Black worshippers in the basement fellowship hall. Those she watched die included her 26-year-old son, Tywanza Sanders, who had tried vainly to distract the shooter, and her 87-year-old aunt, Susie Jackson, who was shredded by 10 hollow-point bullets. At one point, Sanders smeared her legs with the blood pooling at her feet so that the killer might think he had finished her off. It worked. What happened in court two days later, a procession of forgiveness by Black victims for a remorseless racist murderer, both awed and befuddled the world. Many found it to be the purest expression of Christianity they had ever witnessed and could not imagine ever being graced in any such way. With the help of a soaring and melodic eulogy for the victims by President Barack Obama, the church known as Mother Emanuel soon became an earthly emblem of amazing grace. FILE - Tyrone Sanders and Felicia Sanders comfort each other at the graveside of their son, Tywanza Sanders, on June 27, 2015, at Emanuel AME Cemetery in Charleston, S.C. (Grace Beahm/The Post And Courier via AP, File) Grace Beahm/Associated Press Now fast-forward to December 2016. Felicia Sanders is back in court, the lead witness in the death penalty trial of Dylann Roof. She is under cross-examination by Roof's attorney, who is trying to establish that Roof threatened to kill himself that night, a desperate stab at a psychiatric defense. This time there is no nod by Sanders at forgiveness, no prayer for the soul of her son's unrepentant executioner. 'He say he was going to kill himself, and I was counting on that,' Sanders responds coolly in her Lowcountry lilt, glaring at Roof from the stand. 'He's evil. There's no place on earth for him except for the pit of hell.' Roof's lawyer, blindsided, tries once more to prompt Sanders about Roof's suicidality. She is having none of it: 'Send himself back to the pit of hell, I say.' Had something changed about Felicia Sanders? Had she, in the 18 months between the Emanuel murders and the trial, forsaken the commitment to forgiveness that was such a hallmark of her faith and that had so moved the world? 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Emanuel's predecessor congregation, which formed in 1817 after a subversive walkout from Methodist churches by free and enslaved Black Charlestonians, faced immediate harassment from white authorities. The police raided services and jailed worshippers by the scores. When an incipient slave insurrection plot was uncovered in 1822 and traced back in part to the church, 35 men were led to the gallows, nearly half of them from the congregation. The wood-frame building was dismantled by order of the authorities and the church's leading ministers forced into exile. Emanuel's founding pastor after the Civil War, Richard Harvey Cain, used its pulpit as a springboard into politics, winning seats in the state legislature and Congress in a career that mirrored at first the heady hope and then the stolen promise of Reconstruction. During the depths of Jim Crow, Charlestonians assembled at Emanuel to voice outrage over lynchings and jurisprudential travesties. Its civil rights era pastor, Benjamin J. Glover, also led Charleston's NAACP, staged peaceful protest marches from the church, and was repeatedly jailed. Congregants were urged to action there by Booker T. Washington (1909), W.E.B. DuBois (1921), and Martin Luther King Jr. (1962), and then, a year after King's assassination, by his widow, Coretta Scott King (1969). She came to support a hospital workers' strike that bore eerie echoes of the sanitation workers' strike that had drawn her husband to Memphis. Nearly five decades later, the first person shot by Dylann Roof on June 17, 2015, was the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a remarkable prodigy who had been the youngest African American elected to South Carolina's legislature and was serving his fourth term in the state Senate. A horse-drawn carriage carried the casket of the late South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney past the Confederate flag and onto the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol in Columbia, S.C. on June 24, 2015. REUTERS The weight of it all takes the breath away. And for many, forgiveness might seem an inadequate response, given available options like anger, bitterness, hatred, revenge, retribution. A more natural one, perhaps a more human one, might even be 'Where was God?' But in interviews over the years, each of the six family members who spoke mercifully toward Dylann Roof explained that they did so for their own spiritual release. They depicted the moment in mystical terms — unpremeditated, unexpected, the words just flowed, it was God talking. But none said they meant for their words to be read as a grant of exoneration or a pass from accountability. No slate had been wiped. Indeed, some did not care much whether Roof lived or died (he remains on federal death row in Indiana, one of three inmates whose sentences were not commuted to life in prison by President Joe Biden at the close of his term). Rather, the mothers and children and widowers of the dead described their brand of forgiveness as a purging of self-destructive toxins, a means for reversing the metastasis of rage, and at its most basic a way to get out of bed each morning in the face of it all. It served as an unburdening, not an undoing, a method not only of moral practice but of emotional self-preservation. Because the choice to forgive was one dignity that could not be taken away, it also served as a path to empowerment. It might be mistaken for submission, but in Charleston it resurrected agency for victims who had been robbed of it. 'He is not a part of my life anymore,' the Rev. 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She also testified about being pressured to have sex with three male escorts in Miami after Combs invited her to celebrate her own birthday. "I am given my gift, I'm taking a pill and awaiting an entertainer," Jane said, describing a pattern that she testified defined her relationship. Combs' attorneys, though, seized on a text message Jane sent to Combs on her way home: "Just wanted to say I loved and appreciated every detail you put together for my birthday." "You tell him you love and appreciate every detail, right?" Geragos asked.
