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In any case, the loss of Latino students - who make up almost half of the district’s student body - is a central challenge looming for the city and for Pedro Martinez, who earlier this fall became Chicago’s first permanent Latino schools chief. Charter and parochial schools fared better during the recent upheaval. Gentrification, demographic shifts, and the pandemic have all fed into the trend, which has played out differently across neighborhoods and is not fully understood. During that time, Latino enrollment losses for the first time outpaced Black student departures, which in the years leading up to the outbreak had been much sharper.
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These two communities are part of a larger trend of declining enrollment at majority Latino neighborhood elementary schools, which began well before the pandemic but picked up speed in the past two years. Pilsen and Little Village, which grappled with overcrowded schools less than a decade ago, had some of the city’s steepest enrollment losses during the COVID outbreak - both down almost a fifth of their elementary students, compared with an almost 10% decrease districtwide. In nearby Pilsen, another historically Latino neighborhood on the Lower West Side, Ruiz Elementary lost a quarter of its student body in two years. Hammond Elementary, a predominantly Latino school in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, lost almost 30% of its enrollment during the pandemic, shrinking to about 250 students from a peak of more than 500 back in the mid-2010s.