Paul Andrew Bauman and Child Curtis, Sociology
Scholars are interested in how parents think about schools. Yet so far they give only limited attention to the role that race plays in shaping parents’ views. Our research addresses this shortcoming by focusing on two race groups – whites and Hispanics – in order to determine how they think about one specific aspect of school: safety. According to Census data, whites and Hispanics are the two largest racial/ethnic groups in the United States. As such, they have become populations of interest for many researchers. The limited attention that has been given to race has been mostly quantitative in nature. During the past few decades several quantitative studies identify preferences of school safety. Many of these studies show the differences and similarities between whites and Latinos. Kleitz and colleagues (2000)1, for example, studied differences in how whites, Hispanics, and blacks view the importance of safety for their elementary-aged children. They asked parents to rank the importance of class size, safety, location and friends in choosing a school for their children. 80.4% percent of Hispanics ranked safety as important or very important whereas only 62.8% of whites did the same. This shows a variation in the two groups’ selection processes. Unfortunately there are limits Kleitz study. While it helps us understand differences in how whites and Hispanics regard safety, it leaves some questions unanswered. Such as: How do white and Hispanic parents define as safety? Do they feel that their child is enrolled in a safe school now? How frequently do they enroll them in a school that meets their desired safety criteria? What factors or influences do they believe would make a school unsafe?
Safety, in particular, is an important aspect of school environments to many parents. Some parents may voice concerns about bullying and fighting in schools. For other parents, the safety of the neighborhood of the school could be as important as safety inside the school building. Based on our data, we are able to define what safety means for each parent and to answer some of the questions that that Kleitz could not. We provide more detailed information that explains how white and Latino parents define a safe and an unsafe school.
This research addresses the perceptions, beliefs, experiences, and meanings associated with the processes by which white and Latino parents understand school safety. We interviewed 27 white parents and 30 Latino parents. In the interview we asked them questions regarding to who they are, what school within the districts they have had children enrolled in, and what school characteristics do they look at before enrolling their children, etc. Following these questions, parents had the opportunity to discuss various aspects of schooling including school safety. The participants in this study live in low-income areas and attend schools considered disadvantaged. This commonality allows us to assess what mechanisms parents use to conceptualize school safety.
Although there were a large variety of ways that both racial groups defined safety in the interviews, there are some common themes for both groups. This report focuses on 22 of the coded interviews (10 Hispanic and 12 white), looking specifically at how frequently “safe” appeared, in what way they used the word, and what concerns of school safety were most common for each racial group. I sorted the codes into two predominate but distinct categories: ‘physical resources’ and ‘Socio Culture Environment’. Comments made by the respondents about physical resources of any school such as how the school looks, safety of the school (in relation to the building—e.g., “the building is safe”), proximity of the school, transportation, etc. were the first code and comments made by respondents about the environment at schools such as there being gangs, a lot of ESL learners, a lot of students of particular minorities, child’s family member or friends attended, class size, discipline, behavior of other students, child feels welcome, safety, etc. were the second code type. We found 36 code references to “safe” of the 10 Hispanic interviews and 29 code references of the 12 white interviews. When looking further into the codes we found that the word safe was present in nearly the same amount in both racial groups with the exception of socio culture environment. In this code the word safe was present in white respondent interviews 82 times and 113 times in Hispanic interviews.
In regards to physical resources of safety we found that in general Hispanics are more concerned about the school’s precautions to keep the kids inside the school in order to avoid kidnappings. These precautions can be seen as fences or that the doors are locked so intruders can’t enter. “You can’t enter the school if you don’t say why you’re going in. You have to go to the office. The doors are locked. You can’t come in. It’s what I noticed here.” We also found that both Hispanics and Whites will also relate the school’s physical resources of safety to the level of proximity they live to the school. If the family lives closer to the school, then they will feel that the school is safer. Most of this is due to the idea that if their children ever need to walk home from the school, there is less distance for them to travel, which would mean a lesser likely hood of someone or something harmful to happen to their children. However whites will relate this type of safety to the presence of personnel, particularly the principal or crossing guards. When White parents see faculty members interacting with the children especially after school or during recess than they feel that the school is safer in order to limit bullying. “Well, the playgrounds, are they supervised, which they are, the teachers are there or the principal’s out in the morning or afternoon, of course not at night there are always some and adult there to supervise the kids, so that you know nobody’s pushing or fighting or whatever, that was important on the playgrounds to me.”
The other type of safety coded was social culture. For Hispanics the most frequently way of defining this type of safety was a focus on how both the procedures and personnel only allow certain authorized people to pick up children after school. “You know my dad went to go pick up the kids, he’s on the list of people that can pick our kids up, but they ask him for id. And then the kids have to say yes, that’s my grandpa.” White parents on the other hand tend to focus more on if the school has a cross walks or if their children have to cross the street in order to get home. “Just that he wasn’t crossing busy streets to try an’ go to a different school.” Another important thing to note is that both the White and Hispanic respondents shared concerns about the school’s socio cultural safety environment by whether or not the school would have safety drills for both natural disasters and armed intruders.
- Bretten Kleitz, Gregory R. Weiher, Kent Tedin and Richard Matland. “Choice, Charter Schools, and Household Preferences,” forthcoming, Social Science Quarterly, September, 2000.