Where Do You Draw The Line?
I grew up in a town of roughly thirty thousand people. I lived, at the time, in a newly built middle class neighborhood in the 1980’s. I lived there for 18 years of my life and saw families come and go, but the go was still in the same town. They moved just a little more south to the “rich neighborhood”. To the “rich ward”.
I felt the sting of rejection when the families did this. I felt bothered that our neighborhood wasn’t good enough for them, now that they were making more money. I saw that the rich ward (church congregation) got to do cooler activities that required more money.
The great equalizer however, was that we all went to the same high school.
Much later when my own little family was moving to Utah for one year of my husband’s educational training, my desperate search for an affordable apartment close enough to the University of Utah, landed us in the Avenues of Salt Lake City. This neighborhood consists of many beautiful homes built by wealthy homeowners in the late 1860’s and kept up to date by their descendants or buyers able to afford the remodel, sprinkled with meth houses where the unhoused found refuge in the homes that were left to rot. I found myself in an interesting situation of not liking the wealth I saw and lived around and hating the drug abuse I saw used by those in dire circumstances right next door as well.
I would then drive my daughter to kindergarten in Rose Park on the “west side” of town for dual language Spanish immersion. Rose park, for those who don’t know, is considered a “scary” side of the valley and it is in large part because it is also a very ethnically diverse side of the valley. The fact being, that in reality, it wasn’t any more dangerous than the less diverse Avenues on the “east side” where I lived.
As my family prepared to move to Texas for my husband’s job, I worked hard to find another affordable place that would help my kids continue in their Spanish Immersion education. I connected with members of the church there to help me find the best place to live. Many of them discouraged me from certain parts of town that were “unsafe”. These were the parts that had the Spanish immersion schools. There was one section however, a very wealthy side of town, that had a Spanish immersion school, but rental costs kept us out.
We moved to the center of where I was warned to avoid. We were safe and I loved my neighbors.Our ward was majority Latinx and one Sunday, as I was leaving the building to get something out of my car, an older man drove up and asked me where the “Anglo ward” met. I was flummoxed by the question as I thought through what he meant. “You mean the English Speaking ward? We are English speaking.”
Our ward, after a year or so of us being there, was combined with another ward. A richer, more “Anglo” ward. On fast and testimony Sundays, members who were by their own description forced to be a part of our ward, would bemoan this fact and claim that all was well because they knew that they were “good branches being grafted in to strengthen the bad tree.”
I was invited by a woman my age, one of the new “good branch” ward members, to her home in an effort to be friends. As I showed my license to the guard on duty, and passed through the gated neighborhood, I felt nauseated and wanted to turn around.
A few years later, we found ourselves in Utah again. My husband’s job and Spanish immersion schools, once again dictated where we lived. However, at the time with 40 language immersion programs in the state, we could really choose to live anywhere.
As I asked around and talked to realtors, I realized there were major town biases in the state of Utah. I looked at homes on the East side and felt my own biases that I grew up with, rise. I did not want to live in a “rich neighborhood”. I wanted to avoid the High Schools everyone thought were better than others…because I could see a clear economic and unfortunately unintended racial divide.
My kids go to a “title one” elementary school, and their middle and high schools are 48% minorities. Their teachers come from the same Universities that the East side schools teachers come from, so I take a critical look at what the online school ratings really mean.
Out of 20 or so houses in my neighborhood that have school age kids; families send their kids to about 10 different schools. This is because in Utah, you can “permit” into schools you want to go to within your school district. For example, we want Spanish, so we permit our kids to go to the school that is not, by its boundaries, assigned to us. Other families want what is called the “Alps program” which are accelerated learning classes, and others want charter schools that are more religious, more patriotic, or have more technical skills. Then there are the schools with the “better” sports programs (football, basketball, cheer….). Some parents are not granted their desire to “permit” into the school they want. These parents have been rumored to forfeit their rights of parenthood to other parents who live in the school boundaries they want, or lie about their address by using a friend’s, or rent an apartment in the boundaries to use its address, so that their kids can go to the school they want them to.
We self segregate, but we all have our reasons. Reasons that don’t have anything to do with race, but unintentionally..and sometimes intentionally have everything to do with race.
I wish our kids would all go to the same school. I wish there weren’t “rich neighborhoods”.I’ve been desperately trying to start a booster club for my kid’s high school. Seven title one schools (give or take on the year’s enrollment) funnel into my kids’ High School. Many of these students qualify for free school lunch, which means they also qualify for a waiver for sport participation fees, so the kids who don’t qualify for fee waiver have to cover the kids who do by paying more. Then there are the parents that cannot afford $250+ for their kids to play soccer, or well over $1,000 for cheer, but don’t qualify for free lunch, so their kid either uses money from their own job to pay for the activity, or they don’t participate.
These kids from the west side, then play against east side kids whose parents can pay the fees plus anything extra to help the school raise funds for new gear. Our kids have to have their tournaments at better supported schools, because our tennis nets all have holes in them.
My kids’ school had the first and second fastest runners in the state. Our track team had the chance to win state and it would have helped us get more attention and possibly more funding. But one of those runners transferred over to an “east side” school because of the reputation and money that they have. Rich schools are taking away poor unnoticed schools’ chances of becoming great.
There is no equalizer. The divide just gets bigger and this is to say nothing of how people have voted to divert tax funds from west side schools, or legislatures have voted to give more funds toward non public schools.
Our wards/congregations could be that equalizer.This was possibly the goal the stake president had when combining our economically struggling ward with the wealthier ward in Texas. Ward boundaries in other states/countries are much larger than Utah. It makes it easier to include a diverse group of people, ethnically and economically. This works well if the mindset of the people is in the right place of course.
My current ward boundary includes two different streets, not a wide enough net to really mix things up.
But what if the boundaries were drawn in a way that made sure there was a diverse mix? That economically struggling families became friends with economically advantaged families? The kids went to school together and the advantaged families helped support the school financially, so that the disadvantaged family’s kids benefited? What if a disadvantaged kid was shown opportunities by an adult from a more advantaged family and learned all the different ways to obtain a higher education and the advantaged adult wrote letters of recommendation and maybe even introduced the disadvantaged kids to contacts they made in their field and opened doors to these disadvantaged kids that their own parents could not unlock themselves?
What if the disadvantaged family opened the eyes of the advantaged family to a fuller way of viewing humanity and the meaning of life? The advantaged kids could see how hard others work and gain a perspective that is hard to obtain when everything is provided for you. What if the advantaged kids actually realized that their advantages could stunt their ability to really understand what it takes to work hard for something valuable? Their “advantages” have the power to stunt their desires of achieving something on their own merits rather than their parents.
How would either type of family know the other’s needs if they were not closely associated with them? How would they know or care that a poorer school was lacking funds if their own kids did not go there?If we lived our lives closer together, not segregated by rich or poor neighborhoods, what would the impact be? What would poverty rates look like? Would we hate as deeply or negatively categorize each other as much? Would the political divide be as wide?
Malcolm Gladwell in his book, David and Goliath, brings up the idea of the “U” curve. He interviewed a “wealthy powerful person in Hollywood” who was struggling to raise his kids that had been given every advantage possible. He himself grew up in much poorer circumstances before they, through a lot of hard work, pulled themself out of their disadvantaged circumstances. They said this, “My own instinct is that it’s much harder than anybody believes to bring up kids in a wealthy environment. People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they’re ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth. It’s difficult at both ends of the spectrum. There’s some place in the middle which probably works best of all.”
Where do you draw the line?“Inverted- U curves have three parts, and each part follows a different logic. There’s the left side, where doing more or having more makes things better. There’s the flat middle, where doing more doesn’t make much of a difference. And there’s the right side, where doing more or having more makes things worse.”
Point being, no one wants to live in the slums. No one wants to live in high crime, low income housing, where schools struggle. No one wants to live in poverty (ironically enough, I didn’t realize, October 17th is International Day for the Eradication of Poverty when I started writing this). But the same concern may not be given toward that multistoried house, gated with guard access that has schools with unlimited parental funds.
“There is no such thing as unmitigated good. All positive traits, states, and experiences have cost that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits.”
Pastor Jamie White at Salt Lake City’s First Presbyterian church said this, “When we are poor we recognize our needs, but when we have wealth, we don’t see our needs or know what is missing…It has the power to distract us from what really matters.”
Related Articles from Exponent Blogs: found here, and here.
