The annual question on the stroke of midnight announcing the new year is who will be the first baby symbolizing that year?  In Chicago, the first baby of 2005 certainly embodies the realities and problems of contemporary urban life.  You see the baby's mother is a single 15 year old high school freshman (woman? to be pc) who had a restraining order against the 19 year old father.
They live in a largely Hispanic, basically Puerto Rican, neighborhood that is on the edge of of urban chicdom as opposed to gentrification; artsy types are moving in to this gritty area.
 
The new mother attends a high school that, despite a relatively new building abuzz with multiple special programs and attention lavished on the school's minority and lower income population, still ranks low in academic performance, in graduation rates but high in well, social deviance. I know, I know——I'm being judgmental.
 
It is an area I know well; I grew up around there, as did my mother, of blessed memory, and I often taught in that high school.  My motherless mother settled there as a 16 year old immigrant with her father and siblings.  She learned English, as did the other newcomers in this hardscrabble, working class neighborhood of Ukrainian, Polish, Italian and Jewish arrivals (white ethnics as they are condescendingly known——not minorities) by being tossed into a 7th grade class of  40 12 year olds.  No bilingual education paid for by the government; learn the ways of the new country, old country heritage can be taught privately.  And learn she did; she graduated high school with honors at 20 despite caring for her family.  Regretably there was no money for college but she was learning til the day she died. 
 
The classes were still large when I entered the neighborhood grammar school; the diverse——albeit white——student population of working class immigrants and children of immigrants on the whole peerformed adequately academically.
 
But how will little Gianie Jalyn Redmond—Izquierdo, Chicago's first 2005 baby fare?  Will her mother ever finish high school, go into real estate?  And her father?  Will the taxpayers be forced to surrender still more of their hard earned money for this litttle family?  While there is hope eternal, opportunities aplenty; pessimism reigns.
 
Ethel C. Fenig    1 02 05