Discount Stores,Discount(ed) Community? Parent and Family Engagement,Community Outreach,and an Urban Turnaround School

Setting

Developing Connections in Year 1

Unlike the reform advocates who produced the prescriptive literature regarding school turnaround and routinely ignored sociocultural factors (Peck & Reitzug, 2014), Brookdale’s educators from the outset were highly attentive to the cultural backgrounds of their students and the needs of parents and families. Accordingly, from the beginning of turnaround in 2011, the school gave significant attention to engaging students’ families and their community. For example, the school was adorned with bilingual interior signage to make the school more welcoming to the Latino community. There was also evidence of student projects that honored different cultural heritages, and the school hired a translator to assist students and parents who were limited English speakers. The administration hired a community liaison to assist with bringing the school into the community and the community into the school. The school’s educators held special events such as community nights, ice cream socials, and a community carnival/pep rally prior to the End of Grade testing period. The school’s administrators also accessed community partners to establish a food backpack program and maintain a food pantry for times when, explained an assistant principal, “a family loses a home over the weekend . . . or we hear about a family having to move to shelter.”

In addition, a few days before the first year of the turnaround effort started, the school staff conducted a “magic bus” ride. An assistant principal explained,

We also had such a new staff that we felt like it was important for people to just see us. Who is this new [Brookdale] staff? Who are they? So we loaded up a bus full of teachers and bus full of manipulatives and we went out to the communities where most of our kids live and started passing things out—dictionaries, books, math stuff—everything you can imagine—saying school starts next week, make sure you come. Because we had heard lots of rumors prior to coming here that kids don’t show up necessarily right away because we are on a different school track than most of our district.

The school’s administrators and some teachers also made regular visits to students’ homes during the opening months of school. One teacher observed,

I would say at least a third of my kids live at [a Section 8, federally subsidized apartment complex]. So when you pull up at [the complex] people peak out the window and all the kids come out of the apartments from all of the grade levels. And I’ll knock on any door over there or go to anybody’s house. I had a kid that was supposed to be on the bus a couple weeks ago and he went and sat in the car rider room and nobody came because he wasn’t supposed to be car rider, so he called his mom, and she was like, I don’t know what I am gonna do, he was supposed to go to the sitter—and I was like, I’ll run him home if you don’t mind. And she was taken aback because—you know, she was so appreciative. So, I don’t know, I think at some point you have to tread in the grey area between rules and procedures and being a human being.

Educators who provided attention to proactive community engagement through home visits included the school’s first turnaround principal, Principal Young. Midway through the first year (in February, 2012) of the reform effort, she delineated how she used her time. Prescriptive turnaround literature typically framed instructional leadership as a principal’s most vital activity (Peck & Reitzug, 2014). Principal Young, however, obviously wrestled with whether this purported turnaround “best practice” was actually best for her school and her situation. She explained,

The biggest focus is knowing when to stop the social work and start the focus on instruction with such a high needs school. I could spend all day doing home visits, calling DSS [Department of Social Services]—so just knowing how to stop that to start the instructional leader piece has been a challenge.

Principal Young explained how such circumstances convinced her to begin driving students to school in her own car, usually 3 or 4 times a week. She even obtained personal insurance to afford herself some liability protection, because the district neither sanctioned nor was even aware of her practice. Not only was her decision to prioritize student transportation visible to those inside the school, it sent, she believed, a compelling message to those outside the school. Principal Young commented,

I bought liability coverage, because I realized that it was something I was going to be doing a lot of here. And it’s the best use of—it’s quick. Like they all live really close. I can go to 10 houses in an hour. So I do. And like, when I drive up at [location], which is like the biggest public housing that serves our school, they all know who—they know who I am. Lots of times they will just come out and see what I am doing or see if I . . . bring anything. So I think it sets a good standard.

During Year 1 of turnaround, then, faculty and administrators at Brookdale, by directly engaging families and communities, contradicted turnaround literature prescriptions that, for the most part, neglected student cultural backgrounds and parent and community outreach (Peck & Reitzug, 2014). Importantly, some of the approaches during Year 1, like the “magic bus” visits, could be described as surface-level efforts at community engagement, rather than the penetrating type of cultural work detailed by Cooper (2009). Other activities, such as Principal Young’s routine willingness to engage in home visits and transport students to school, moved closer toward cultural work (Cooper, 2009).

No matter the particular nature of the engagement during the first year of turnaround, though, it was clear that robust, meaningful outreach depended on trust and that turnaround had complicated parent and community trust when large numbers of teachers departed due to reconstitution. A 27-year veteran teacher, one of the 30% of teachers to remain at the school after reconstitution, explained to us after Year 1 of turnaround concluded,

You know, we had a rough time. I will be honest. From the time we found out that it was going to be taken over, or a turn around school—until the beginning of this year it was hurt feelings from the staff that didn’t get back. The parents were upset certain teachers didn’t get back and it was just—it’s been such turmoil with that.

A significant challenge for Brookdale’s many new educators during Year 1 of turnaround, then, became establishing the baseline trust necessary to develop deeper, more meaningful collaborations with parents and the community. In this way, an ice cream social or a ride to the school from the principal became an invitation to a more lasting school–community relationship.

Navigating Cultural Difference

Brookdale Elementary’s educators were predominantly White and students were predominantly African American and Latino. Accordingly, racial, ethnic, and cultural dynamics and issues regularly surfaced in interactions among faculty, administrators, students, and families. While some of our participants described their approach to students as color-blind, others explicitly discussed how students’ and their own cultural backgrounds informed their educational approaches. For instance, an African American teacher explained that her race and gender had helped her make significant inroads with African American male students. At the same time, she noted that the school under turnaround had made more positive inroads with the Latino community than the African American community.

I think with the Hispanic community we have made great strides with getting them in. I just think it is going to take a lot more to get African American families on board. At this point in time if we have anything at school, our Hispanic families are showing up, and our African American families aren’t.

Such comments suggest that, as the largest student population at Brookdale, the Latino community may have received the most visible attention, such as through the school’s bilingual signage and its hiring of a full-time translator.

Some of our study participants discussed their experiences working with Latino students. A fourth-grade teacher who was White commented,

I remember my first year some of my Hispanic boys did not know that I understood and could speak a little bit of Spanish so the very first day or two that we were in there, they were trying to talk about something and I basically told them that that was not appropriate in Spanish, and they looked at me like “You are White. You are not supposed to be able to understand me.” So I think it affects how they look at me, but I don’t think—I mean, I was raised to not look at people differently because of that. So to me, my kids are all my kids. So I don’t really think it affects that much. Sometimes I think it affects the relationships that I have with some parents because here I am coming into their community and their town. So that takes a little bit of time for trust.

This teacher’s allusion to the necessity of developing trust with people who were different from her underscores the idea that cultural divergence affected educational practices at the school. Occasionally, teachers made objectionable statements, such as “these kids do not take care of these computers . . . they expect, they expect, they expect” or that the community is a “repository of people who can’t keep it together.” Most manifestations of deficit thinking, though, emerged as a genuine concern and respect for students mixed with a negative assessment of their families and living conditions, which were typically framed as a series of obstacles and limitations. One teacher, for instance, commented that Brookdale’s parents “love their children, but most of them don’t really know what is best for their children.” A White teacher who had been at Brookdale for more than 25 years explained, “it is just lack of education and lack of resources in the homes and the lack of the education that they just can’t get out of the cycle.” The original principal under turnaround, Ms. Young, stated,

Any time there is a [holiday or other] break [from school] and we don’t have our eyes on the kids you just worry. Because lots of them are responsible for themselves. And lots of them— you know, we feed them two meals a day at school so breaks are hard for them. So when they don’t come back [from break], it’s lots of red flags.

Much like the educators profiled in Biag (2016), then, study participants from Brookdale Elementary framed family and community life conditions via a deficit lens even as they engaged in actions reflective of a genuine caring and concern for students, families, and communities.

Notably, some study participants became culturally transformed by the experience of teaching at Brookdale. A fifth-grade teacher who was White and female explained,

This neighborhood and this school defies [sic] a lot of stereotypes about poor Black families and poor Hispanic immigrant families. And there is way more parental involvement than the general public thinks there is in schools of poverty. The values of the parents are very supportive of education.

She noted that, during the third year of turnaround, educators at the school were participating in a book study regarding African American male students, and that she was “just trying to check my own stereotypes . . . were [African American male students] really doing something that deserves for them to be called out or in trouble.” Her developing cultural awareness carried over to her teaching; she explained that she regularly discussed issues of race and racism with her students.

Similarly, a second-grade teacher who was multiracial (with a parent from the Middle East and a White parent from the United States) described the multiple ways that she discussed racial and cultural identity with students and became a strong advocate of the school’s attempts to engage parents and community. For instance, she spoke positively of administrator efforts to encourage improved school–family connections.

[The administration] really do encourage you calling home . . . [they] will get you a translator if you need a translator . . . I’ve seen a lot of parents coming in and eating lunch . . . Everyone feels welcome, or they know they can find someone they can talk to.

She described these efforts as “doing double work,” which suggests the tricky cultural landscape educators experienced. Was the phrase an apt summation of how educators in this urban turnaround school went above and beyond for their students and families? Or was the phrase reflective of a debilitating deficit mind-set present among educators at Brookdale? In the end, such questions indicate how educators at Brookdale encountered complex intercultural dynamics. Providing proper attention to sociocultural issues meant educators had to exert constant effort to be aware of circumstances that might affect their students and to be mindful of their own individual cultural identities, yet they received only limited support to do so.

Daily Commuters

In addition to engaging with student cultural backgrounds in complex ways, educators at Brookdale made personal choices regarding where they lived in relation to the school. Most of our participants commuted to the school from communities at least 20 min and up to an hour away. A White teacher who was a recent college graduate in her third year of teaching, all at Brookdale, explained her rationale this way:

The majority of the reason I chose to live so far away was just to limit student interactions. For example, there is another . . . teacher who lives in my complex, and she can’t go to the pool in the summer, because her students live in the apartment complex, because she is within a five-minute drive from her school. But I also—you know, it doesn’t impact the way that I think about these kids. It is food for thought, because I had the means not to live in this neighborhood. So I chose not to for safety purposes, as a single woman living by herself. So it is interesting that I chose not to live here, but when I drive home, I consider it more of—my first and foremost thought was just to be away where I won’t quite see the students when I am out at dinner, you know, having a glass of wine, and then it is an issue. And I also moved in before I got my job here, but I knew that I was going to work here, but it wasn’t official. So sometimes I worry when they go home in this neighborhood, especially kids who walk long distances, but I am very much here all the time. I feel like I only eat and sleep in my apartment. I am always here. But it was a conscious choice to live, essentially, on the other side of town for a number of reasons.

One teacher, however, reported that she lived in close proximity to the community that the school served. An African American instructional support specialist, she explained the benefits of her choice this way:

I am close enough to [the Brookdale] district that at WalMart or the grocery store, I will see some of the kids. So seeing me outside of school I think it helps, you know, she has a daughter, or she goes to the grocery store. They kind of see, well, she is like everybody else . . .

As these examples suggest, teachers had real discretion over where they lived, even as they may have wrestled with their choices. Due to factors like personal choice or familial obligation (e.g., a spouse’s work location or provision of day care for their children), most of our educator participants resided outside of the community that Brookdale Elementary served and drove to the school. They acted, essentially, as daily job commuters, which necessarily affected the depths of connections they could and did establish with the school’s community.

Used Tires and U-Hauls

Brookdale’s students and families, conversely, typically had fewer transportation options and, therefore, more limited mobility. A teacher explained, “there are some families that walking is their mode of transportation.” Complicating matters, the city offered no regular public bus service; the local bus service ended in the 1990s and was replaced by a small, appointment-only, point-to-point van service that charged several dollars each way. When we walked the area surrounding the school, we noted that many busy streets lacked sidewalks, while some heavily congested intersections had no crosswalks or pedestrian crossing signals. We would characterize the typical vehicle being driven in the area as an older model with dents and other signs of age. Signifying the transportation condition in the community, vendors throughout the area sold discarded tires. One large shop about a mile from the school featured a marquee announcing “Used Tires.” There were hundreds of old tires scattered about in ill-defined black mounds.

Adding to the challenging transportation context for families was what teachers described as Brookdale student population’s transience, which appeared in two forms: movement in and out of the school or movement from housing location to housing location within the school’s zone. A White fifth-grade teacher explained, “pretty severe poverty. A lot of transience. We get kids coming and going all year.” Another teacher stated, “It’s heartbreaking when you put in so much work and the student up and moves.” The departure of the school’s first turnaround principal had little effect on the students, one teacher asserted, because “the students are so used to people turning over that they are just kind of like, well, onto the next person . . . their home lives are so transient.”

Other area indicators suggested an unstable work and living environment reflective of conditions generated by widespread poverty (Schutz, 2006). When we visited a local social services agency, for instance, one handout on display described employment opportunities in the area. Available listings included fast food restaurant staff, discount store representatives, senior living residence associates, call center representatives, and seasonal department store workers as well as the phone numbers for temporary staffing agencies. Another handout described food assistance, free meals, and housing and shelter options. Such documents indicate how food, shelter, and employment insecurity constituted real concerns in the Brookdale community. If the mostly modest compact cars in the parking lot behind the school symbolized the mode of commuting for teachers, U-Haul vans offered for rent from a local vendor just south of the school symbolized the mode of temporary relocation for many Brookdale families.

Important Community Spaces

As scholars like Green and Gooden (2014) have emphasized, there is real danger in describing a community solely through its challenges and deficits. Doing so denies the vitality and strength latent in communities, especially urban communities of color that must struggle against various obstacles. Indeed, despite the transient nature of working and living conditions as well as other tangible symbols of poverty in the Brookdale community, crucial supports and future potential resonated in some important spaces, including the school itself, that served as identifiable community assets. For instance, the school was located across the street from several social service institutions, including a dental office, a medical center, a youth center, and the county’s department of social services, including public health. A supermarket was located within a mile of the school, as were a small variety of discount stores. A White Kindergarten teacher explained,

I think one thing about [Brookdale] is we have the health department and we have [a public] Medical facility right here. Which works—dental, such things. Department of Social Service—all of that is right there. I think that really helps define that our families—some of our families need their services and there are some families that walking is their mode of transportation, and so that way they are able to come to school, pick them up, and walk to the doctor and come back . . . having a [supermarket] nearby—it is easier for them to catch a ride.

In this way, the school was almost ideally situated to provide families with access to a number of essential support services.

The school itself also offered supports to children and served as a cornerstone of the community. Describing services the school offered by Year 3 of turnaround, a White grade-level intervention specialist explained,

We have an all-new SST—student support team—and they have been great. So that means we have a new nurse, a new counselor, and a new social worker. And I think they have done a lot of work this year talking about kids and really making sure that services are provided for them. And I think that has been real positive for students and families getting more connected with us and getting more help.

The school also established partnerships with local churches. A different White grade level intervention specialist noted, “I mean, there is a ton of churches and organizations . . . in this area that are really helping.”

When we asked teachers specifically about what places defined the Brookdale community, most said the school or, perhaps reflecting their status as daily commuters to the area, stated they did not know of any defining spaces. Three participants mentioned a biannual carnival that took place on the empty parking lot outside the closed factory building just south of the school. A music teacher who was White noted,

when the carnival is there it is all the kids—I mean, you just scrap your lessons for the whole week because that is all they want to talk about. . . . A week or two. I am not sure. . . . Everybody goes to the carnival. It is interesting students who aren’t even wearing proper clothes will go to the carnival at least once while it is here.

A White third-grade teacher explained,

We have had to turn our shades because you can see it from some of the rooms on that side of the building, so they have had to close the blinds so the kids aren’t staring out looking at the fair instead of learning, which is ridiculous.

Besides the school, WalMart proved the most common place mentioned when our participants discussed key institutions that helped define the Brookdale neighborhood. Located about a mile south of the school, WalMart, one teacher explained,

is a significant place to this community. It is fairly new. And a lot of [community members] used to—before it opened up here and it was out on the other side of town, it was an adventure to some of them to get there. So I think now that it is more convenient—you go in there and you can see families of [Brookdale] in WalMart. I think that is why that is a place.

A White Kindergarten teacher stated,

What would be an important place? I think WalMart would be. I think that seems to be a place that they see friends—they will come back and say, “WalMart has all my friends.” Or “I am getting to go to WalMart.” They don’t just see it as a grocery store—they see it as a toy store, as an all-encompassing thing. Like all our needs can be met there.

On one hand, the major retailer was a concern based on its history of questionable labor practices such as low wages and uncompensated overtime. On the other hand, WalMart was an asset in that it drew shoppers from across the city, provided access to cheap goods and fresh food for the local community, and was within close distance of many Brookdale Elementary families’ homes.

Finally, we mention the massive empty factory building that loomed over the school and offered a vivid suggestion of a more vibrant past. Opened originally as an airplane factory during World War II, it operated as a missile factory in the 1950s until the 1970s when the United States signed the first weapons reduction treaties with the Soviet Union. During that time period, Brookdale Elementary was built to serve the families of the White, middle-class engineers who worked in the factory, while a hospital was opened across the street from the school. Restaurants, grocery stores, and shopping plazas opened to serve the burgeoning locale surrounding the factory. When the factory changed to phone services, declined in the 1980s, and eventually closed in the 1990s, the Brookdale community was already in a state of decline. The hospital across the street from the school closed, only to reopen as the headquarters of the county’s social services agency.

When we spoke with participants in August and September of 2014, we heard mention of press reports describing an impending sale of the closed factory. In theory, the sale might secure a new owner who would reopen the factory and, by extension, bring more jobs to the area. On an area visit in October 2015, however, we saw promotional posters that stated the factory grounds would be used as the setting for a month-long Halloween-themed event involving costumed zombies. During that same visit, we also saw a sign on a lamppost outside the parking lot across from the factory; this was the location of the biannual carnival that regularly entranced the school’s students. The sign stated “Conditional Rezoning” and included a city services number to call for more information. One of the researchers called the number and learned that the planned building project involved a grocery store and convenience store with gas pumps. The city council would vote on whether to approve the project later that month. On that research day, building surveyors were on site making measurements. Amid the speculation of possible economic activity that could boost the area, Brookdale Elementary School, one of the few buildings in the community that remained unchanged in design, function, or purpose since the 1950s, stood and endured.

Institutional Progress by Year 3

By Year 3 of turnaround, the school engaged parents, families, and the community in meaningful ways that suggested substantial progress since Year 1. A White fifth-grade teacher interviewed in the midst of Year 3 stated,

I feel like they [parents and community]—when the takeover [reconstitution via turnaround] happened—they were really upset and confused and what is this school now, I don’t know any of these people. And now they have seen some of us for a few years in a row and they see administration is still here and they are like oh, this is our school, this is how it goes. I think a takeover is really hard for the community. It is just everything is all different. They took away all the school rules, they took away the mascot—everything changed. So now they are getting used to it again. So that is good.

The Parent Association (PA) meetings had generated more interest, and the new PA president was bilingual. Spanish-speaking parents were provided headphones for translation during some meetings and events. A White grade-level intervention specialist noted,

We are trying to do more things where we can get parents to come in, where it is not so frou-frou, but they are actually coming in to learn something. So within [the Parent Association] we are doing book exchanges where they can come in and bring a book and exchange it for a new book. We are planning on doing an intervention type night where parents can come in—it will be like a make and take, where they can come in and learn about a center that they can work on with their children at home—they can make it and take all the materials home to work on it with them. And that would run through not only our intervention students, but also our ESL [English as a Second Language] students, or EC [Exceptional Children] students as well.

Though not yet an equal exchange of ideas between educators and parents and, again, reflective of a complex intercultural dynamic, these new Parent Association meetings offered an important signifier of the school’s firmly established engagement with parents and families.

Developing Cultural Workers?

As importantly, individual participants from our study acted in ways suggestive of cultural workers (Cooper, 2009). For instance, the second principal, Principal Davis, while still serving as the assistant principal at the start of Year 2, led a group of Latino parents in a protest against the central office to ensure that they obtained a bus route so their children did not have to walk or find rides to school from their homes just over 2 miles away. Over 50 parents came to the school at his encouragement to voice their complaints. The previous principal recalled,

He had been dealing with some bus complaints because they all live in what used to be a no-transport zone . . . He had said [to the parents] get together and come up to the school and share your concerns about the bus. And they did. And they got a bus. So it was the craziest thing . . . I called [the central office] and said, “Let me tell you what is happening over here.”

After the end of turnaround Year 3 as he continued on as principal, Principal Davis and his family moved closer to the school (he had been commuting an hour each way previously) so they could be more connected to the school. Asked how long he wanted to stay at Brookdale, he explained,

As long as I possibly can. You know? Until I feel like I am not effective, I guess . . . if I am not effective, then I think I have to realize that I am not effective. And some part of the effectiveness, I guess, is improving academic achievement. So if I am able to do that, I want to do that. But if I am not, then I want our children to have somebody that is able to do that. I feel like I can do the culture piece and relationship piece, and I think those are things that will increase the level of academics. I am hoping that working on those things will continue to push our academics.

In another case, starting before turnaround initiated and continuing through the first year of the reform effort, an African American teacher looped with her students and remained with them from second to fifth grade. Though initially reluctant, she recalled she did it “because I am interested in knowing, when do our Black males decide that it is cool to be dumb? When do they stop having that passion to be intrinsically motivated or even want to prove or satisfy their families?” She continued,

I looped with them all the way to fifth, and those Black males were the highest performing. And as I think back—I didn’t think about it as much then because everything started changing, you know, went through the turn around, because the first year of turn around I was with them in fifth grade, so I really stopped thinking about it. I think it was just going on, but I don’t know if I pushed them harder because that’s what I wanted. And they are over at middle school now doing fantastic and in the highest groups over there. And I don’t know if it was—you know, because I wanted them to understand. You can do it, you know.

Reflective of her commitment to the school and its students, she enrolled her son in the school though she lived outside of the attendance zone. This teacher, much like the second principal under turnaround, also chose to stay at Brookdale after 2014 when the formally sanctioned turnaround effort was over. Propelling such decisions was a clear, deep personal connection—to students, the school, and the community—that transcended their roles as educators and suggested they were emergent cultural workers deeply vested in the school and the community.