Chicago has a poor track record of delivering for its weakest students but this latest chapter, arguably an inevitable and predictable consequence of school choice, may be a new low. Students who need the healthiest and most stable schools are segregated in the most unstable institutions, often with the most troubled classmates. Victims of a set of powerful and destructive forces that have undermined their schools and neighborhoods, these students and their schools face an increasingly bleak and uncertain future.

Despite that, Austin’s loyal supporters believe they can come back from the brink. They recently launched a plan to save their beloved school that hinges on a counter-intuitive strategy: reopening next fall as an old-fashioned comprehensive high school, a place that takes—and works for—all comers from the larger Austin neighborhood, one of Chicago’s 77 community areas.

“We want to be a neighborhood school again; that’s the tradition and we want to try to revive it,” said Randel Josserand, a CPS administrator who oversees Austin and a nearby community. He is working with a group of locals and alumni that insist the school is unfairly shunned. “We can’t let the anchors of our communities die.”

The odds are stacked squarely against Austin’s renaissance. Nearly 76 percent of Chicago’s high schoolers this year opted against attending their assigned neighborhood high school, CPS data show, accelerating a trend since the early 2000s of students bypassing their default school.

At Austin, only four families came to a well-planned open house in March, despite sending 430 invitations to students admitted to Austin’s manufacturing-technology program for next fall. Certain schools deserve to be shunned because of violence and poor academics, but many like Austin, though relatively low achieving, never get a chance to show what they have to offer. Once saddled with a bad reputation, changing the minds of parents, students, and elementary school counselors—who hold great power in dictating where eighth graders go—is a Herculean task.

Austin was once a storied school that served students of all abilities, but its run as a neighborhood school ended poorly, as happened in other increasingly poor and violent communities. Austin was phased out beginning in 2004 because of weak performance and chaos in the building—a legacy that still haunts it today. Austin was part of a wave of school shake-ups starting around 2000 as the city grappled with weak and chaotic high schools and flight to the suburbs. New school openings, as well as greater choice in a system traditionally built around neighborhood schools, were central to Chicago’s turnaround plan.

The Austin campus reopened in 2006 with three small schools, available to anyone in the city, though nearly all came from the Austin community. The academies, focused on business, manufacturing, and technology, attracted students early on to a safer and more academically rigorous environment than at the old Austin High, though achievement remained low. But then enrollment fell off steeply, by 400 students between 2012 and 2015. And, most troubling for plans to draw primarily from the Austin neighborhood this fall, just 8 percent of 712 eighth graders in Austin’s attendance boundary chose Austin in 2014. That’s common among Austin’s peer schools: 14 schools enrolled less than 10 percent of eligible neighborhood kids this year, CPS data analyzed by the Chicago Tribune shows.

Like other schools hanging on by a thread, Austin can’t seem to catch a break. Each school has its own story: Austin was hurt by staff turnover and its location in a rough neighborhood. The foreclosure crisis as well as a big drop-off in the 15- to 19-year-old population in the Austin community—a 17 percent decline between 2010 and 2014—also appear to have hurt Austin’s enrollment.