Reply to How does your public school build community with economically diverse families

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My kids are starting to ask about the differences and not want to associate with friends who are from a less well off part of the neighborhood. They are starting to associate negative behaviors with certain kids or groups, which I'm trying course correct. The pandemic fragmented a lot of relationships and we didn't have a lot of in person events. We invite the entire class to parties and events, but ultimately only one or two kids will come from what is perceived as the lower socioeconomic area. All our field trips are free, we have free movie nights, lots of free events. We host events at the rec center that is more convenient to families who often don't have access to transportation. what have you done? Create smaller groups of parents and kids? Have more events to create real friendships? [/quote]

Well the first thing we did was not think we could use other families to help us to check the liberal boxes of being friends with a “diverse” group of people 
Then we didn’t pretend that our kids could not see the differences and were living the experience vs us a parents removed from the situation who want to engineer an experience instead of accepting that it isn’t our experience and we don’t really understand the dynamics of classrooms and school yards
Then we were honest and didn’t pretend we didn’t live in a safer and stable home and that we were going to let our kids go over to homes that were not either just to pretend. 
Unfortunately there are situations where kids are literally living in physically unsafe homes:apartments ; and some have a lot more people in the home than expected and the assumption is those people will provide supervision but no one in the home is able to, and sometimes the kids themselves tell tales about their neighbors and family that made our kids scared and they didn’t want to find out if they were true 
And then we finally admitted we wanted a different experience for our kids academically and socially and switched them to private school 
Because lower socioeconomic schools can only offer so much and they can never offer a lot of the things that happen at the other schools because of cost and equity. If it costs money to do, it usually is not going to be an option to offer bc of fear that some kid can’t afford it. Academics come second to social services. It’s not wrong but if your child doesn’t need those services than half of their time in school is wasted.

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