MEDILL REPORTS CHICAGO – On a late afternoon in Altgeld Gardens, the neighborhood is quiet and still.

Snow-packed sidewalks muffle the air as one of Chicago’s major snowstorms of the season gets underway. The snow keeps falling as students enter a classroom at Larry Hawkins, a charter school that is the only high school in this Far South Side community. Altgeld Gardens is a sprawling public housing complex – hemmed in by the polluted Calumet River and a sewage treatment plant, in which the average income is less than $10,000 per year.

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