Growing Up in the Suburbs Was Not So Bad After All

By Jeremy J. Ly

Should where you are born determine your future? No, but in reality it does. A good school system, safe, prosperous and vibrant community makes all the difference.

Growing up, I did not appreciate living in a small suburban town. There was nothing to do and nowhere to go. Now, that I am a tad bit wiser, I look back on my youth and realize growing up in the burbs was not so bad after all.

My mom grew up on the east side of Joliet (wrong side of town) and my dad grew up in war-torn Vietnam (wrong side of the world), so finding a safe and quiet place to raise a family was priority for my parents. In the 1980s, my parents found a really small town to set up roots – Minooka, Illinois.

I can remember as a teen, just longing for the days to get out of my town. Replace Minooka with any of the hundreds of sleepy suburban communities that dot the Chicagoland area, it’s all the same. My friends and I wanted to escape from suburbia.

After graduating Illinois State University with a journalism degree, I finally got my escape. Selected to teach in a high-need area with Teach For America, I was going to make a difference.

Going into my first classroom in Chicago, I was an idealist. I was going to teach and change the world. Quickly realizing, in addition to teaching, I was a nurse, dad, probation officer and social worker. Suddenly, everyday became a juggling act as I learned how to manage all my new roles.

Working in urban education, one discovers a main predictor of high school graduation is simply the zip code of where a child is born. In Minooka (60447) and many of the suburban high schools, nearly 90 percent of students complete high school, compared to a city high school in the Englewood community of Chicago (60621), where only 50 percent of students graduate.

There are many factors why students do not complete high school: parent involvement, quality of teaching, lack of interest, gangs, drugs, but a lot has to do simply where a student grows up.

I am fortunate to have parents who were able to choose to start their family in a quaint town with good schools.

Many kids are not as lucky as me to have parents with the necessary means – a lot of low-income families are stuck in what is commonly referred to as the poverty trap, a cycle of poverty passed from parent to child. The poverty trap is extremely hard to break.

Had I grown up on the east side of Joliet or in a low-income neighborhood of Chicago would I sit here today with my college degree? Maybe, but the odds would have been against me.

With some life experience under my belt, I can look back and say growing up in suburbia was probably the best for me. Thanks 60447.

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