(slow calming music) (keyboard keys clacking) - I'm an attorney.

I practice family law and child protection work and adoption.

I have two kids, Eli and Emma.

Eli is 12.

Emma is nine.

My husband, Scott, we've lived in Chicago since 2005.

Before I moved to Chicago, I lived down in Pekin, Illinois.

I was a state's attorney down there.

The population of the town is 2,000, kind of a working and middle-class community outside of Peoria.

We like that everything is walkable.

We walk to school.

We can walk to the stores, any of the shops.

We like kind of being in the middle of all of it.

I mean, it's really still a community here.

There's a lot of different people who live here.

There's a lot of families like us that have older kids that are just raising their kids in the city.

And a lot of retired people like to live downtown, too.

It was important for us to go to school in the community.

A lot of our friends and peers had looked at and did go, ultimately, to private schools, parochial schools, but we really never seriously considered any of them.

We didn't apply.

We didn't pick up flyers or take any tours.

We were committed from the start to only go through CPS.

(kids chattering happily) So during recess time, half the kids are here and the other half are on the roof as long as the weather's above like 20 degrees.

The local school for Chicago Public Schools is Ogden.

So Ogden International School of Chicago.

The location's great.

You know, what is this?

Seven minute, 10 minute walk?

You know, everything is right here.

It's just in the heart of the city.

It's really, you know, very much a downtown school.

And it's been a downtown school for years.

This school's been here since 1857.

That's what, 20 years after the initial founding even of the city of Chicago.

So there's been a school around this location since even before The Great Fire.

Yeah, and I love the diversity of the curriculum.

I think it's like 58 languages spoken here.

We have a very large international community.

So all those reasons, Ogden was a really clear choice for us for the type of education and the type of environment that they would offer.

(slow calming music) So the merger discussions started around like 2015 or so.

Ogden was over-enrolled.

You know, our boundaries are pretty large.

And the old Cabrini-Green neighborhood, Jenner was under-enrolled and under-utilized.

The building would fit a thousand-some students, and there was 200, 250 students facing the under-enrollment.

They're looking at potentially getting closed.

The schools are really close to each other in the city.

We're not talking about a drive.

We're not busing kids across town.

You know, they were under-utilized.

We were over-utilized.

We were a half a mile apart.

Why don't we all come together and merge all the students and split them up into two different, you know, you can have the younger students at one campus and the older students split up into two different campuses.

Various, you know, advocacy groups came up with the idea and proposed it to CPS that this should be a viable option to look at.

And then it became a greater issue that, you know, we're looking at these two communities and the idea of merging these two communities and kind of these identities, that they were too different to be together, too different to merge.

Ogden had been a very diverse student body, but Jenner was, you know, 99% black.

(slow somber music) So I went to several of the public forums.

A lot of the concerns, you know, that the neighborhood is gonna be dangerous, still was, you know, Cabrini-Green.

I mean, there's racial overtones and undertones, I think, in the meetings.

So a lot of the people that, you know, express concerns, some of it more overt that we're gonna have these, like, rough kids, you know, right?

That it was going to be behavioral problems.

A lot of people then that had concerns, you know, the Jenner campus's has performance numbers were lower than Ogden so it was going to, you know, lower Ogden's performance.

(Rachael laughing) Do you wanna get out one of the pencils, and I can fill this out while we're here, too, if you want?

- Yeah.

- All right.

We weren't afraid to send our kids over there, and it's like this "over there."

Like, I'm not afraid to send them over there.

The complete assignment, anything for me to scan or anything for me to check?

This was just a worksheet.

This wasn't the quiz.

I didn't think that it was dangerous.

I didn't see it as something that would impact my kids.

The area's changed a lot, too.

I think that some of that was an older conception of what the neighborhood had been like.

It just doesn't really exist anymore.

(whimsical music) (bell rings) (kids chattering indistinctly) Yeah, this is really cool.

Students here sent a sympathy card after the assassination of Dr. King.

- [Principal] What we've been trying to do is show the history of the building, right?

And keep that history alive while we're still Ogden.

- [Rachael] Oh, yeah.

Those turned out beautifully.

So a photographer, you know, documented through photos the year after the merger, and then created these panels.

With the younger kids, they don't see the distinction between the neighborhoods or the distinction as such that as, I think as you get older, may know or remember that there were two different schools and it's two different like communities, right?

(door creaks) A lot of our friends left.

We stayed because we wanted a neighborhood education, and Jenner is, you know, right down the street.

This is part of our neighborhood.

- The townhouses here just opened this summer.

The development is happening just constantly around the school.

Hopefully next year we'll see a little bit more realistic numbers as far as students- - [Rachael] Of students from the neighborhood.

Being part of the diversity of having students from all backgrounds, from all income backgrounds, from racial backgrounds, from cultural, religious backgrounds was really important to us.

- One of the most important things you learned about is what a molecule is, right?

Why is it important to know what a molecule is?

- [Rachael] My kid's not going to school to only, you know, learn math and learn this skill.

I mean, they're learning how to work with their peers and how the world actually is.

- Three most important things you learn in 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3, looking at thermal energy and why it's important.

- [Rachael] I think the kids from both schools, you know, benefit from sort of a leveling out of all the income and resources.

You're spreading it out in a more equitable way.

- [Student] Should we write about like the hot and cold and how fast?

- [Rachael] And I think with Chicago Public Schools in general, or my perception of many of them, you get these neighborhood-based schools and the school is all Latino, all Black schools.

You know, you get sort of white pockets of schools.

In creating a system where it's segregated, there is inequality.

You're gonna have all these little equal pieces of pie that are completely separate from each other.

What's the argument that you're able to do that in an equal handed way?

You know, inherently in the separation, it's not cut equally.

(kids chatting indistinctly) I think that working through the schools has been, and is a way to, you know, to merge communities.

So far, this has been successful in doing that.

(kids chatting indistinctly) I think that my kids benefit, have benefited, and will benefit from having that experience and from being part of what is a more reflective picture of what their community looks like.

(kids chatting indistinctly) (slow somber music)