In #Chicago, Campaign to Provide Safe Passage on Way to School - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/education/in-chicago-campaign-to-provide-safe-passage-on-way-to-school.html?_r=0
The first day of school in one neighborhood on this city’s far South Side brought a parade of security workers in neon vests, police officers on patrol, an idling city fire truck and, briefly, a police helicopter hovering above. All this to make sure that students from a shuttered elementary school could make it safely past abandoned lots, boarded-up houses and gang territory to get to their new school less than a half-mile away.
[...]
When Chicago leaders announced last spring that they would close 47 elementary schools this fall, the move stirred worries far beyond education. Many parents feared it would require some children, particularly those on the city’s poorer South and West Sides, to walk down more crime-ridden blocks and across ever-changing gang boundaries.
