Reply to What should we PS3 Liberal Activist Gentrifiers do, and not do?

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[quote=Anonymous]I was in your situation, OP.  We are not high SES but we are well-educated and do OK, certainly better than a lot of families with kids in DCPS.  I am a graduate of DCPS so I had the experience of being the significant white minority at a school and also being somewhat or a lot better off financially than my peers.

I think that you are right to just think through what steps you can take to avoid missteps.  I did experience open hostility when we first started at the school.  It's hard to miss people flat out ignoring your friendly "hi."  It's hard to ignore people staring at you with an outright nasty look while you are trying to help out the school.

Things I did that worked well (or seemed to):  helped out once a week in the classroom.  It helped me get to know the kids really well. Then at school events or pick-up time, the kids would greet me with a big smile, wave, hug, and that would open the door to chatting with their parents.  It just seemed to break down barriers.  I didn't do it for that reason, really, I did it because I had time but not money and wanted to be a part of my kids' school.  But it did have that extra added benefit plus the teachers appreciated it.  We have zero spare money, but I would always round up the field trip money, say $10 instead of $7, figuring that that could help the teacher help out another kid.

I was always super friendly to everyone.  We also were the 1st white family to move on our block since the riots, according to our wonderful neighbors, and I think it really helped that we are just a normal family.  When we first arrived we had one crappy 2-door American car.  At school, judging from what the kids and adults said, our lives were certainly less glamorous and full of extras than a lot of the other families'.

I think the biggest misunderstanding I had is that, just because the school had a high FARMS rate and was almost all AA, didn't mean that there weren't plenty of strongly middle class AA families.  So for example out of a class of 25 kids, there were a few middle class white kids, several middle class AA kids, and then some low-income kids.  Only a handful were misbehaved in any way and my kid was certainly not perfect, still isn't.  They had a lot to offer and the were/are great kids.  Even though I had wonderful friends from similar backgrounds in high school and almost no white friends to speak of, somehow the "hype" got to me when it came to sending my own kids to school.  Luckily we didn't have money for private and fell in love with the school we picked and it allowed me to see how wrong I was.  I agree that it can be daunting to join a group who, by the statistics, seem to be vastly different from you.  On the other hand, often, as we did, you will realize that they are only different from you in some surface ways that aren't so deep.  We were in a rapidly gentrifying school, though, so I wonder what it would have been like if there hadn't been a small group of families like ours the first year and then more each year until now.

I agree with the gloves, supplies to the specials teachers, and not trying to be TOO overtly involved the first year.  There are a lot of little ways you can quietly be very helpful and then that also allows you to get the lay of the land and figure out more ways to help.

Good luck OP.   Being aware of differences is not a bad thing.  It helps you to be a better person and pretending that there isn't a fundamental difference between an extremely low income family and a high-SES one is ridiculous.  Just realize that to the kids the differences are going to be less of a big deal and once you get to know the other kids and adults you will realize that the differences aren't as big a deal as people would have you believe.[/quote]

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