Chicago Public Schools students who live in direct proximity to a homicide often suffer in the classroom afterwards, but a new report from the University of Chicago examined the ways schools can mitigate the impact that violence has on kids.
The findings of that report, published this week by UChicago’s Consortium on School Research, show the ways some schools are already working to limit the negative effects that living near violence can have on students.
“Unsurprisingly, living in close proximity to something as significant as a homicide has a negative effect, on average, on academic achievement,” said David Johnson, one of the study’s lead authors. “But what’s really important is that in a subset of CPS high schools, some students living in close proximity to homicides did not experience those negative outcomes. And that’s important because it’s evidence in a really sort of fundamental way that schools matter in this equation.”
According to the report, between 2011 and 2019, about one in five CPS students lived within .2 miles of a homicide in any given year. The report found 6% of students experienced this multiple times in a single year, while students living in Chicago’s lowest income neighborhoods were the most likely to live closer to a homicide.
And once a homicide occurs, the study found, it often leads to negative impacts in the classroom for the students living closest to the violence.
