Five years ago today we featured a video on the paradox of Bucktown elementary schools.
The paradox or, more accurately, the anomaly? Bucktown‘s population was:
… young, affluent and mostly white. But visit a Bucktown elementary school and you’ll see a much different picture – Hispanic children, typically from low-income families, playing with their friends and speaking Spanish. At Bucktown’s three public elementary schools – Burr, Drummond and Pulaski – more than 75% of all students are Hispanic.
Bucktown has become whiter, more affluent and less Hispanic over the past 5 years. The elementary school population has changed somewhat, but still doesn’t reflect the neighborhood.
At Burr in the 2009-2010 school year, 83.5% of the students were low-income, 66.3% were Hispanic and 22.5% were Black. Drummond accepts students citywide, and 50.2% were low-income, 54.9% Hispanic and 33.8% White. Pulaski remains a neighborhood attendance area school, but has become Pulaski International School with a student population that was 93.7% low-income, 91.5% Hispanic and 4.8% White.
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