Bright Futures For Chicago Public School Valedictorians

Bright Futures For Chicago Public School Valedictorians

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This fall, top graduates from the Chicago Public Schools will be heading off to colleges and universities around the state and the country. Writer Ben Austen wanted to capture the stories of some of the best and the brightest at CPS, so he created short profiles of 20 CPS valedictorians and salutatorians, which he recently shared on his Instagram.

Morning Shift talks to Austen about the project and we hear from one of the students he profiles. Jennifer Banks is the valedictorian from the Richard T. Crane Medical Preparatory Magnet High School on the Near West Side. She recently addressed her graduating class. In August, she heads to Dartmouth where she’ll study everything from medicine to sociology to public policy to Chinese,