School as solution to the problem of place: Student migration, perceptions of safety, & children's concept of community

Urban school reform increasingly locates student migration as solution to the problem of urban place. Low-income Latino and African American parents and their children describe how social, economic, and environmental factors combine with schooling experiences to delimit “place” for children and impact their perceptions of community. The paper explores how safety plays a key role in the restrictions of children by parents and how it factors into their schooling experiences in a total institutional environment.  As such, it characterizes how one community is displaced by another, however, inadvertently. Recognizing children’s views of place, not only as a product of their observable experiences, but also as the ways in which they interpret and express those experiences, we combine interviews of parents and children with children’s community asset maps and photographs to convey an understanding of how they perceive their communities and what changes they offer to improve them. Data are taken from a larger case study of a unique private school [the World Citizen’s School] that buses low-income children from their neighborhood to an ultra-modern facility in the heart of an a major urban center.