The portion of young Chicagoans neither going to school nor working is returning to pre-COVID levels — but it’s an uneven recovery that has left behind Black teens as well as adolescents in the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Overall, about 45,000 16- to 24-year-olds in the city are disconnected from both school and work, accounting for roughly 12% of the city’s residents in that age group — a rate just slightly higher than pre-COVID.
“In the aftermath of the pandemic when things looked really shaky, these overall numbers are very encouraging,” said Matthew Wilson, associate director at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Great Cities Institute and one of the authors of a new study on youth disconnection. That was until researchers zeroed in on Black teens, he added: “When I saw these numbers, I thought, ‘Wait a minute.’”
From Chalkbeat Chicago (To go to the actual article, please click on this link.)
